Network Observability

🌐 Monitor Network Availability, Performance & User Impact with GermainUX

📊 Monitoring Perspectives

Monitor network performance from two complementary perspectives:

Combining infrastructure and user-side telemetry helps teams identify network conditions affecting applications and users.

👥 End-to-end Flow

User → Browser → Network → Application / Server → Infrastructure

🖥️ Server-Side Network Monitoring

The GermainUX Engine can continuously monitor network connectivity and performance between a monitoring source and target server.

Use Engine-based monitoring to identify:

• Network availability

• Connectivity problems

• Slow response

• Latency

• Performance degradation

• Target availability

Monitoring can execute continuously according to a configurable schedule.

👤 Real User Network Monitoring

GermainUX RUM provides visibility into the network conditions experienced by actual users.

RUM JS or the GermainUX Browser Extension can capture browser-side network information such as:

• Network quality

• Page and resource loading performance

• DNS lookup time

• Connection time

• Network request performance

• Effective connection type

This helps determine whether poor application performance is associated with the user's network connection.

📡 Network Quality Detection

GermainUX can classify the effective network connection observed by the user's browser.

Network grades include:

• slow-2g

• 2g

• 3g

• 4g

Organizations can define which grades should be considered poor.

For example:

slow-2g, 2g, and 3g

can be classified as poor network conditions.

📍 Poor Network Location Detection

GermainUX can identify locations associated with poor network conditions.

When a user's network grade becomes poor, GermainUX can generate a Poor Network Location metric containing available location and network information.

This helps teams identify whether network problems are concentrated around particular locations or user populations.

⏱️ Network Response Time

Monitor network response time between GermainUX and target systems.

Response-time monitoring helps identify:

• Slow connectivity

• Network degradation

• Intermittent performance

• Target responsiveness

Thresholds can be configured to detect when network response time exceeds acceptable levels.

🚨 Detect Network Issues in Real Time

GermainUX can help detect conditions such as:

• Target unavailable

• Slow network response

• Poor user network

• Network grade degradation

• Connectivity problems

• Network conditions affecting application performance

Detected conditions can be analyzed, alerted on, reported, or used to trigger operational actions.

🔍 Correlate Network Performance with User Experience

Network telemetry becomes more valuable when correlated with application and user-experience monitoring.

For example:

Slow Page → Slow Network Request → Poor Network Grade → User Location

or:

Application Unavailable → Target Server → Network Connectivity

This helps teams determine whether poor application experience originates in the application, supporting service, infrastructure, or network.

📊 Real-Time Dashboards & Reports

Analyze network telemetry through customizable dashboards and automated reports.

Examples include:

• Network availability

• Response time

• Poor network conditions

• Network grade

• User location

• Network-related application performance

• Historical network trends

Network telemetry can be combined with application, browser, server, and infrastructure monitoring to provide broader operational context.

🔔 Alerts & SLA Monitoring

Configure alerts and SLA thresholds for network conditions requiring attention.

For example:

• Target unavailable

• Response time exceeds threshold

• Poor network grade detected

• Connectivity degradation

• Repeated network-related application issues

Thresholds should reflect the expected network performance for each monitored environment.

⚙️ Automation

Network conditions can trigger GermainUX automation.

For example:

Monitor → Detect → Analyze → Alert → Automate

Depending on the environment, automation can include:

• Notifications

• Reports

• Scripts

• Incident workflows

• Other configured operational actions

🔗 End-to-End Observability

Network monitoring can be combined with other GermainUX monitoring capabilities to provide end-to-end visibility.

For example:

User → Browser → Network → Application → Service → Server

This allows teams to understand both:

What did the user experience?

and:

Was the network contributing to it?

🔧 Deployment

GermainUX provides two primary network-monitoring approaches:

GermainUX Engine

Deploy a Network Monitor from a GermainUX Engine to monitor connectivity and performance between a source and target server.

GermainUX RUM

Use RUM JS or the GermainUX Browser Extension to monitor network conditions experienced by actual application users.

See Deploy Network Monitoring for deployment instructions.

ℹ️ Get More Information

Network monitoring can be configured according to your applications, infrastructure, users, locations, performance requirements, and network architecture.

The GermainUX team can help configure network monitoring, analytics, thresholds, dashboards, alerts, and automation for your environment.

ℹ️ Advanced Configuration

Network monitoring can be extended by creating multiple Network Monitors for different source-to-target paths and combining the resulting telemetry with application, infrastructure, and user-experience monitoring.

For user-side monitoring, advanced RUM configuration can be used to adjust the effective network grades considered poor according to the performance requirements of the application.

Please contact us for any help.