How do you ensure your network is always performing optimally?

Agreed, plenty of free / cheap solutions to provide this output and your ROI / plan to produce an ROI is almost immediate if any investment is required.

Making sure your hardware is up to date and specs out to handle the load being put on it will significantly reduce any strain on your network. Utilizing a 3rd party vendor will greatly enhance your ability to monitor your network and ensure it remains stable.

I think observability is key for operations. You can't fix what you can't see. Make sure you choose the right tooling. This is important because too much tooling can give you false positives. Stay focused on your operational needs when choosing the right tooling & of course your budget has a role to play in this. However taking one step back, things like IPAM (single source of truth) & DNS design play a very large role in making observability a lot easier and meaningful. I feel this is an important first step if you want to get the most out of your observability.

regularly monitoring your network is essential for maintaining optimal performance. This practice allows you to track metrics like bandwidth, latency, packet loss, availability, and utilization. Using tools like SNMP, NMS, or network analyzers can help you collect and visualize this data. By staying vigilant, you can identify problems early on, prevent user disruptions, and make informed decisions about upgrades and expansion to accommodate future needs.

Use Network Optimization tools, to monitor and improve network performance. This involves analyzing the network infrastructure, identifying problems and performance issues, and implementing solutions to eliminate or mitigate the problems

Documenting your network and keeping this up to date adds tremendous value to troubleshooting. Time spent understanding, getting to know your network, documenting changes is knowledge that will always contribute to faster resolution. Tight change management controls and automation can really help to mitigate against config errors & poor/lengthy roll back plans.

Full visibility goes a long way, you can’t optimize or troubleshoot blindly regardless if you have the latest and greatest hardware and firmware. No single monitoring solution out there will cover everything you need no matter what the salesmen will tell you. Good design that fits your infrastructure and business needs is a must. Don’t agree to vendors’ solutions without fully understanding the ins and outs of the proposals. Do your homework when it comes to best practices, you will save yourself a lot of headaches and unnecessary long night.

It is critical that all businesses maintain some form of a Business Continuity Plan. It is important to rehearse the scenarios annually which will greatly reduce your time mitigating the issue.

Maintaining accurate network documentation, including network diagrams, IP address allocations, hardware configurations, and software versions will help you in troubleshooting, and ensure that your network is properly organized and managed.

Optimisations should always be done with the Service as context. Some optimisations are good for some services but might downgrade the performance of others. So optimisation is a balancing act mostly in large scale enterprise networks running multiple services.

Employ techniques such as traffic shaping, compression, caching, and load balancing where applicable to optimize network traffic and improve overall performance.

Yes you can exercise this option, however I don’t believe that with currently available technology that this is required. Toolsets can manage this for you and are straight out of the box with generally speaking reasonable pricing. All in all this can be applied but the buy vs build an entire process / case to apply this will typically tip onto the buy option being cheapest all across the board. Bandwidth and misuse shouldn’t be a concern at high level providing you have valued appropriate toolsets to manage this.

Totally agree with this, not only is this paramount from a security perspective (that could save your bacon when vulnerabilities are discovered on old patches) but means this could optimise your hardware(s) ability to communicate across your network. I’d advise staying away from Beta / test patches if your core driver is performance > features.

I tend to agree here, however reviewing your network is not enough you need to be also doing failover testing on a periodical basis. This ensures that any redundant links you have are working as expected and no services are impacted during unplanned outages.

To ensure your network is always performing optimally, regularly monitor and analyze network traffic, apply quality of service (QoS) policies, maintain hardware and software updates, and conduct periodic performance tuning and capacity planning.

The hard skills are obviously important, but there is an often overlooked element of soft skills that can have a massive impact. Make yourself known and approachable. Stop by just to chat with your frequent flyers and “problem users”. The better your rapport, the easier it is to ask them for a ticket instead of just shooting you an email. The more they think of you as friend instead of enemy, the more likely they are to pay attention when you teach or advise them. Set expectations and communicate timelines, use more words than necessary. None of this may directly improve your network but long term it frees up your time for those proactive tasks that are so crucial.

1 Know your network traffic, check requirements of traffic flow and apply appropriate QoS policy. 2: proactively monitor the network. Review possible bottle neck. 3: look at the overall network while fixing the issue. Try to avoid patch work.

Ensure that there is a well documented change control process in place and any changes to the network or infrastructure is carefully reviewed and tested before being implemented.

Stay updated with industry trends, attend conferences, and participate in professional networks to exchange knowledge and best practices with other system administrators. Collaborating with colleagues and staying informed about new technologies can help you optimize your network performance.

Standardize every work in your network! Use systems like Ansible / Terraform for configuration management as example. Define an internal standard for everyone in the network team to stick with it, it's start with the Naming of the Switches or Firewalls and Keep it Simple!