Question

A customer emails ServerCentral stating that they are having latency issues or packet loss. What information would you request from the customer in order to start troubleshooting this? Are there specific tools or metrics you'd use to troubleshoot this problem?  

Answer 1

Ans: -

A customer emails Server Central stating that they are having latency issues or packet loss. The network latency has become a very common problem in networks. The sudden slowdown in the performance of the network can be a threat when you are doing an urgent task like you are attending an online meeting and your network goes down. This is known as the network latency when network does not give good performance and there is delay in the response of the network server.

Network latency is the time taken by the network while requesting data or sending the data from the source to destination. The delay in the transmission of data can create problems while an important task is being performed. Milliseconds are used for the measuring of the data. The latency in the network should remain closer to the zero which is considered as the best network performance.

As we know data is sent in the form of packets across the network but when data fails to reach its destination then it is known as packet loss. Packet loss over the network can be due to the errors in data transmission or congestion of the network.

While customer is sending email and it does not reach its destination then there might be network latency issue. First, we need know to the size of the email that customer is sending. A network latency can be increased when customer send email with large attachments which increases network latency time. We also need to make sure that customer is not using the whole bandwidth of the network. Network latency can also be increased due to downloads, uploads and online streaming. Using multiple applications and resources can cause the slowdown in any network. There is also the packet loss in the network while customer sends the data and it hasn’t reached the destination. This ca be a problem somewhere in the middle of the network as the route the data packets are following could be interrupted because to network congestion.

For troubleshooting the network latency issue in network first we can ensure that network driver is properly installed on the device. Then we can restart all the networking devices, resources and hardwares. There are error detection and correction techniques for checking where the error occurs in the network and how to correct that error. So, the packet loss can be identified and corrected with the help of these techniques.

There are many tools and metrices for testing network latency and increasing the speed of network latency. My TraceRoute tool is used for measuring the network latency and also it can troubleshoot and reduce the network latency issues.

Network performance monitor tools are available in the market for measuring network latency, testing of network latency and network mapping etc. With the help of these features we can easily identify the issue and resolve it.