Good Network Management Begins With Your ISP Connectivity

July 28, 2025 at 5:00 PM EST

In a digital world, a healthy and optimized enterprise network is essential. Whether you’re a one-person office or multinational conglomerate, your network is as important to your business as electricity is to your home. However, monitoring and managing your network for performance, availability and growth is anything but easy.

At the most basic level, monitoring and managing your network involves optimizing, securing and overseeing its infrastructure and services. That’s easier said than done. First, you need visibility into the network to understand how it’s performing, how much bandwidth is available and where opportunities for improvement may exist. This is where network performance management (NPM) tools can help.

 

The Importance of Network Performance Management

 

NPM is the process of capturing, inspecting and analyzing network data to gain insights into the behavior and patterns of network traffic. NPM tools help IT managers and teams gather network data, measure performance variables and identify potential issues that may affect network performance. Aggregated, organized and presented in an intuitive dashboard, the data provides a real-time, comprehensive view of the network’s overall health.

The underlying technologies that dictate how network performance data is gathered, processed and presented vary. The most common include: SNMP-based tools that use the Simple Network Management Protocol to gather data about network devices; passive network monitoring that quietly observes network traffic without actively sending packets; and active network monitoring that sends simulated traffic across the network to test performance.

Depending on the specific solution, an NPM tool can provide information regarding network performance, availability, latency, jitter, bandwidth utilization, throughput, port and server status, errors, alarms and more. In some cases, an NPM tool can also provide visibility of the metrics and performance of network-connected devices.

Armed with this information, IT managers can:

  • Identify congestion areas that may be slowing down throughput.
  • Review circuit and network performance and availability over time to spot trends and opportunities for improvement.
  • Analyze traffic patterns for device issues and misconfigurations, and understand how resources are being consumed.
  • Troubleshoot and resolve issues before they affect network performance and availability.
  • Accurately plan for future technology upgrades, increased capacity requirements and network expansions.


System-Specific Monitoring and ISP Connectivity

 

The capabilities of today’s all-in-one network monitoring platforms, like DataDog, SolarWinds and Nagios, are as diverse and far-ranging as the number of solutions on the market. But they aren’t the only class of NPM solutions.

Whereas a comprehensive solution offers a broad overview of the network’s infrastructure, traffic, hardware and devices, a system-specific solution provides a deep dive into the health of a critical system or aspect of your network. Examples include automated infrastructure management solutions (AIM), power and cooling management, and network security management. Arguably, one of the most important network systems is the fiber and Ethernet infrastructure connecting your network to your internet service provider(s) (ISPs). As part of the network’s physical layer infrastructure, a high functioning ISP network is necessary for the entire network to operate at peak performance.

Managing ISP connectivity includes monitoring key metrics such as:

  • Bandwidth usage that helps identify bottlenecks and overloaded connections and enables data-based capacity planning
  • Latency performance to measure data transmission speed and understand what applications and devices the network can support
  • Packet loss, which is directly related to user experience and data throughput
  • Availability, as measured by the percent of uptime that the ISP connection delivers; a critical requirement for high-demand enterprise networks
  • Response time, indicating how long it takes for the network to respond to requests

Metrics can be aggregated to provide an overview of how the entire ISP connection is performing, or network managers and IT teams can drill down to view the status and performance of individual circuits, both Ethernet and fiber. A centralized dashboard enables network teams to receive status updates, review historical trends, create reports, monitor bandwidth allocation and more.

A good example of how all this comes together is the Network Performance Portal from Glo Fiber Business.

 

Network Performance Portal

 

The Glo Fiber Business Network Performance Portal provides your network teams a powerful, easy-to-use tool for monitoring, managing and optimizing your Glo Fiber Business ISP connections, traffic and services. An online, customizable dashboard delivers real-time views of all your Glo Fiber Business network services, 24/7 access to your account management tools, and the reporting tools you need to reduce costs and improve service performance. The Network Performance Portal gives you and your IT staff “anytime, anywhere” access to the information and tools needed to monitor, investigate and control your connectivity and network services.

  • Review circuit and network performance over custom time periods or with daily, weekly and monthly reports.
  • View your bandwidth utilization and submit an order or request a notification from the portal when needed.
  • Use standard or custom reports to monitor carrier and business network performance by analyzing and tracking usage levels.
  • Track the operational success of your agents to see which are performing well and which may need coaching.
  • Access the portal anytime, anywhere, from any browser-enabled device.

The Network Performance Portal is a tiered service solution. The Basic Portal provides access to performance reports on all metrics the solution monitors. The Premium Portal provides performance reports, plus interactive profile views that include real-time statistics regarding utilization, status and service availability of the network and network services.

 

Let Glo Fiber Business Help Boost Your Bottom Line

 

You can’t manage what you can’t measure. The Network Performance Portal enables your network teams to see, manage and optimize one of your most important network systems – ISP connectivity. As a result, it can help increase network efficiency, performance and reliability and improve the health of your entire network. Just what you expect from Glo Fiber Business. With a proven track record of delivering powerful services and dedicated customer support, we take care of you, so you can take care of business.

To see the benefits yourself, schedule an on-site demonstration of the Network Performance Portal today.