What is Network Performance Monitoring?

What is Network Performance Monitoring (NPM)?

Meta description: Discover what Network Performance Monitoring is, how it works, and why endpoint, flow, and packet analysis are key to solving performance blind spots.

Network Performance Monitoring (NPM) is the practice of visualizing, monitoring, optimizing, troubleshooting, and reporting on the health, availability, and performance of your network, as experienced by your users.

Modern NPM solutions collect and analyze data from multiple sources to provide full visibility across hybrid, multi-cloud, on-prem and edge environments. This includes traditional device metrics, flow data, and packet analysis, as well as endpoint network monitoring that extends network visibility to the user’s device.

By combining these perspectives, Network Performance Monitoring ensures IT teams can detect, diagnose, and resolve performance issues faster—before they impact critical business services.

How Does Network Performance Monitoring Work?

NPM solutions ingest telemetry from multiple layers of the network and IT infrastructure:

• Device Metrics – Information from SNMP, WMI, CLI, APIs, logs, and synthetic tests for monitoring availability and performance of IT Infrastructure.
• Network Flow Data – Summarized traffic records such as NetFlow, jFlow, sFlow, and IPFIX that reveal who is communicating, when, and how much data is transferred.
• Packet Data – Deep inspection of network packets, which carry details about every transaction and application request.
• Endpoint Packet Analysis – Visibility into network conditions from the perspective of the user’s device, helping diagnose remote user, Zero Trust and cloud issues that traditional network probes may miss.

Look for a platform that unifies diverse monitoring approaches into a single, holistic view of network performance to ensure faster problem resolution.

SNMP Monitoring

Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is one of the most widely used methods for monitoring infrastructure. SNMP provides metrics such as:

• Device availability and interface status
• Bandwidth utilization
• Latency, packet loss, errors, and discards
• CPU and memory consumption

SNMP is supported on an extensive range of devices, including routers, switches, firewalls, printers, IoT devices, and even some endpoints.

Flow Data Analysis

Flow records act like a “network phone bill”—summarizing conversations across the network. Flow monitoring answers questions such as:

• Who is communicating with whom
• How often, for how long, and how much data was transferred
• Which applications or services are consuming the most bandwidth

Benefits of flow monitoring include:

• Bandwidth utilization and WAN traffic visibility
• Peak usage and traffic pattern analysis, including capacity planning
• QoS validation and SLA performance monitoring
• Troubleshooting of network congestion or misconfigurations

Full Packet Capture

Packets don’t lie. Packet capture enables IT teams to analyze every transaction in detail. A packet includes both:

• Payload – The content of the communication (e.g., voice call, email, file transfer)
• Header – Metadata such as source/destination addresses, ports, and protocol details

Packet analysis supports:

• Troubleshooting network errors like retransmissions and packet loss
• Diagnosing application slowness and poor performance
• Identifying security threats and anomalies
• Incident response and forensic analysis

The best packet analysis solutions continuously capture and store all packet data for historical, as well as real-time analysis.

Endpoint Packet Analysis

Modern IT environments have outgrown traditional data center-based network monitoring. As more users connect remotely, applications shift to SaaS and cloud, and Zero Trust architectures encrypt traffic through VPNs and tunnels, critical visibility gaps emerge. Endpoint network monitoring keeps pace with traffic patterns that no longer pass through those choke points.

Endpoint packet analysis addresses these blind spots by capturing telemetry directly from the user’s device. Instead of losing sight of traffic that does not traverse the data center, IT teams can see exactly how the network is performing from the perspective that matters most—the end user. With endpoint-level data, organizations can:

• Troubleshoot remote access issues such as Wi-Fi instability, VPN congestion, and ISP slowdowns.
• Understand Cloud and SaaS performance by measuring latency, packet loss, and responsiveness across paths that bypass on-prem monitoring tools.
• Regain visibility into encrypted environments, correlating network and application performance even when traffic is tunneled through ZTNA or VPN.
• Accelerate resolution by combining endpoint telemetry with flows, packets, and device metrics for a complete, correlated picture.

By extending monitoring to the endpoint, IT teams eliminate blind spots and gain true end-to-end visibility—across users, networks, and applications, no matter where they reside.

The Riverbed Approach

Riverbed Network Performance Monitoring integrates device, flow, packet, and endpoint monitoring into a single solution. With tight integration across data sources, IT teams gain:

• Unified dashboards that correlate metrics, flows, packets, and endpoint data
• Accelerated troubleshooting of complex performance issues
• Seamless integration with Riverbed Aternity Digital Employee Experience (DEX) and Riverbed IQ AIOps for advanced analytics and automation

By blending APM, DEX, and NPM data, Riverbed provides IT and business teams with a dynamic map of network and application performance. This reduces mean time to resolution (MTTR), improves service delivery, and ensures a better digital experience for every user.

To learn more about Riverbed’s approach to NPM, click here.