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NETWORK OBSERVABILITY

Network Observability: Best Practices and Tutorial

Network observability goes beyond traditional monitoring. Learn how synthetic testing, RUM, and Internet Performance Monitoring help IT teams detect issues before users are affected.

8–11 minutes
Denton Chikura

CHAPTERS

    NEWSLETTER

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    The quick download:

    Network observability means monitoring the full Internet path, not just the infrastructure you own.

    • Traditional monitoring tells you something broke. Network observability tells you why it broke and where the problem sits, even when it’s outside your network.

    • Synthetic testing and real user monitoring work best together: synthetics catch issues proactively, RUM shows what users actually experience in production.

    • Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM) covers the layers you don’t control, including DNS, BGP routing, CDN edges, and transit ISPs, that directly affect user experience.

    • Start by baselining normal performance for each application, region, and service path, then layer in synthetic probes and BGP monitoring to detect anomalies before they reach users.

    Network observability is the practice of making internal network behavior and external performance visible through telemetry, analysis, and correlation. Legacy monitoring systems often rely on static thresholds and siloed metrics; however, network observability seeks to reconstruct system state from diverse data sources, including metrics, logs, traces, and active measurements.

    In the context of modern applications, network observability includes understanding performance from the end-user’s perspective.

    Most applications are now delivered over the Internet, whether as SaaS offerings from the cloud or as private applications accessed via VPNs or SASE clients. They’re also increasingly complex, comprising distributed microservices and relying on third-party APIs and external services.

    Hence, the traditional approach of monitoring only internal networks and infrastructure is no longer sufficient. Organizations require a more holistic approach to track the performance of these applications, one that not only monitors system performance internally but also captures the actual user experience across the whole delivery path.

    This article explores the concept of network observability, its importance, and best practices.

    Summary of Key Network Observability Best Practices

    Best practiceDescription
    Leverage both synthetic and real user testing for observability.Synthetic tests simulate user interactions from fixed locations. Real user monitoring (RUM) captures actual end-user performance in real time.
    Focus on user experience.Focus on how users perceive application performance, latency, errors, and availability, from their network path, device, and location.
    Monitor from the outside-in.Deploy synthetic probes and collectors outside your network to capture user experience across ISPs, geographies, and cloud regions.
    Use multiple geographically distributed probes.Deploy monitoring agents across ISPs and continents to detect local/regional outages or slowdowns.
    Monitor the Internet.Implement Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM). Monitor the entire Internet stack, including DNS, BGP, transit ISPs, and CDN edges, to detect upstream issues that affect reachability and latency across uncontrolled infrastructure.
    Monitor BGP announcements and routing behavior.Continuously monitor BGP updates, prefix announcements, route originations, and AS path changes to detect potential hijacks, route leaks, or suboptimal routing that could affect network reachability and performance.
    Baseline normal performance.Establish baseline performance for services and regions to detect anomalies faster.
    Perform a full webpage performance test.Application performance largely relies on web traffic and interfaces. Measuring page load performance is crucial to understanding the real user experience.

    Observability vs. Monitoring

    Traditional network monitoring tracks known metrics against static thresholds to detect failures within your infrastructure. But outages, latency, and degraded performance often result from issues outside your internal network, such as cloud regions, ISPs, DNS, or path performance issues.

    Network observability extends that visibility to the full delivery path. It combines synthetic tests from cloud-based vantage points with real user monitoring (RUM) to diagnose root causes, whether they sit within your infrastructure or somewhere along the global Internet. Observability correlates signals across internal systems and external paths to provide end-to-end visibility.

    The table summarizes the differences.

    AspectNetwork MonitoringNetwork Observability
    DefinitionThe practice of collecting predefined metrics to track network health and performance.The ability to infer the internal state of the network from external outputs and telemetry.
    FocusReactive, detects known issues using thresholds or alerts.Proactive and diagnostic, enabling a deep understanding of unknown or emerging issues.
    Data typesPrimarily metrics and logsMetrics, logs, events, traces, and flow/packet-level data
    Questions answered“Is something broken?”“Why is it broken?” or “What could go wrong?”
    ScopeDevice-centric (routers, switches, links)User-centric, service-centric, and path-aware
    Tools usedSNMP, ICMP, NetFlow, SyslogDistributed tracing, BGP feeds, synthetic tests, real-user telemetry
    Use case exampleMonitoring switch uptime or interface errorsUnderstanding why users in Europe experience higher latency to a cloud app

    User Experience

    End-user perception of performance matters as much as server-side metrics, and it varies by device, location, and network path. User experience has become a primary metric for modern applications. Traditional application performance monitoring (APM) tools capture what happens inside your systems. DEM extends that visibility to what users actually experience across their device, network, and the public Internet.

    Digital experience monitoring (DEM) addresses this gap by combining real user telemetry, synthetic testing, and internet path visibility into a single, unified approach. DEM focuses on how users interact with applications across every layer of the delivery chain, from device performance and last-mile connectivity to DNS resolution and cloud region access. By combining internal data with external measurements, DEM helps teams proactively manage performance, reduce blind spots, and ensure consistent digital experiences across diverse geographies, networks, and user environments.

    Real User Monitoring

    Real user monitoring offers real-time, end-to-end visibility into how your apps behave from the user’s perspective, combining data from devices, networks, and applications. It collects telemetry directly from real user devices, capturing actual performance in production environments.

    Synthetic Testing

    Operations teams simulate end-user experience and pinpoint performance bottlenecks along the entire Internet path by utilizing external vantage points and synthetic probes deployed across multiple geographies, ISPs, and cloud regions. These points generate synthetic probes from diverse geographic and cloud vantage points to simulate user activity and test availability across regions. They simulate how users in different parts of the world actually experience services. Geographically distributed synthetic testing helps differentiate between global outages and localized issues, offering clarity when incidents arise. Comparing performance across geographies, carriers, and edge locations enables you to pinpoint last-mile issues or peering problems that affect only specific user segments. These insights enhance diagnostic precision and ensure your monitoring strategy reflects the real diversity of your user base.

    Comparison

    The table below compares real user monitoring with synthetic testing to highlight how they complement each other.

    FeatureReal User Monitoring (RUM)Synthetic Testing
    Data sourceReal users, real devices, real sessionsSimulated users from controlled environments
    CoverageReflects real traffic from real users and networksCovers chosen locations, networks, and use cases
    Use caseUnderstand the actual user experienceTest availability and performance proactively
    Best forMeasuring performance impact from real-world variablesDetecting issues before they impact users

    Monitor the Internet

    The Internet is now part of your application delivery chain, and it’s unpredictable. Organizations need Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM) to gain visibility beyond their own infrastructure. Unlike traditional Application Performance Monitoring (APM), IPM helps track critical elements of the Internet stack, or the layers of external services and protocols that applications rely on to reach users. This includes:

    • DNS resolution
    • BGP routing
    • CDN performance
    • Transit ISP health.

    Each of these layers represents a potential point of failure that can degrade performance or break connectivity. IPM continuously monitors these components to identify real-time issues, such as ISP outages, routing anomalies, or congestion, that directly impact the user experience, often before internal tools detect them.

    To achieve full Internet observability and proactively manage performance in a distributed environment, monitoring tools should be capable of the following:

    • Track Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) to detect early signs of network congestion and preempt user-impacting degradation in TCP/IP traffic.
    • View the complete client-to-application route to identify latency spikes and bottlenecks. Adding geo-location data to this route helps pinpoint the source and destination regions of performance issues.
    • Ensure test traffic originates from and is delivered to accurate, real-world regions that reflect the locations of actual users and applications.
    • Monitor connectivity and performance across cloud regions and CDN edge nodes, where localized issues often go unnoticed.
    • Compare performance across transit ISPs and peering points to spot regional slowdowns or carrier-specific degradation.

    This level of Internet observability is what makes reliable performance possible in distributed, cloud-native environments.

    Monitor BGP Updates

    The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the de facto routing protocol of the Internet, responsible for directing traffic between autonomous systems (ASes) worldwide. BGP is also susceptible to hijacks, route leaks, flaps, and misconfigurations that can disrupt application performance and availability. Monitoring BGP updates in real time helps teams instantly detect and respond to potential routing anomalies before users are affected.

    Comprehensive BGP observability includes:

    • Integrating direct peer feeds
    • Public sources like RouteViews and RIPE RIS
    • Partnering with global network operators to access real-time, full routing table updates.

    It’s also important to monitor your private BGP peers and the routes propagated to and from them. This provides end-to-end visibility, from internal infrastructure to Internet-facing services and users.

    Tracking route origin validation, hijack counts, peer changes, withdrawn prefixes, and watching path changes over time ensures continuous insight into routing behavior and its impact on user experience.

    This BGP monitoring guide provides a deeper insight into why comprehensive BGP observability is crucial for maintaining performance and reachability across the Internet.

    Baseline Normal Performance

    To effectively detect anomalies, you first need to understand what “normal” looks like. Establishing a baseline for normal performance under healthy conditions allows teams to quickly identify deviations that could signal problems. These baselines can be customized per application, region, network, or service path, providing relevant context for each scenario.

    Over time, baselines reveal seasonal trends or time-of-day patterns, helping teams distinguish between expected fluctuations and genuine performance degradation. They’re especially useful when evaluating the impact of code changes, infrastructure upgrades, or routing adjustments, as they offer a reliable point of comparison for performance validation.

    When defining performance baselines, it’s essential to understand three related but distinct concepts:

    • Baseline: Establishes what “normal” looks like under healthy conditions. It serves as a reference point to detect deviations and identify potential performance issues.
    • Trend: Reflects long-term directional changes in performance over days, weeks, or months. Trend analysis helps uncover slow degradations or improvements that may not trigger alerts but still affect user experience over time.
    • Seasonality: Captures recurring, time-based patterns, such as time-of-day usage spikes, weekday vs. weekend behavior, or seasonal peaks that separate expected fluctuations from true anomalies.

    Webpage Performance Testing

    To deliver fast and reliable user experiences, organizations must go beyond basic uptime checks and perform full testing of web page loading. This involves measuring key metrics such as Time to First Byte (TTFB), First Contentful Paint (FCP), and total load time across all page components. Full load testing provides visibility into how real users experience the site. By identifying performance bottlenecks early, teams can optimize front-end code, improve infrastructure, and ensure consistent service delivery.

    Tools like WebPageTest enable comprehensive testing under real-world network and device conditions. These tools help simulate user interactions, track performance, and analyze detailed load sequences, revealing issues that might otherwise go unnoticed. Leveraging such tools enables organizations to transition from reactive troubleshooting to proactive optimization, delivering faster and more reliable digital experiences that meet user expectations.

    From Monitoring Blind Spots to Full-Path Visibility

    For teams managing modern, distributed applications, traditional internal-only monitoring leaves significant blind spots. Network observability fills those gaps by combining internal metrics with external visibility across DNS, BGP, ISPs, and real user experiences. Organizations that build this approach into their monitoring strategy detect problems faster, improve user experience, and catch issues that internal-only tools miss.

    Gain full visibility of your entire service delivery chain.

    Your users don’t care whether the problem is in your data center or at a transit ISP three hops away. LogicMonitor’s network observability capabilities, from synthetic testing and BGP monitoring to real user monitoring, help you find and fix issues wherever they occur.

    FAQs

    What’s the difference between network monitoring and network observability?

    Network monitoring tracks predefined metrics like uptime and interface errors using static thresholds. Network observability goes further by correlating signals across internal systems and external Internet paths, including DNS, BGP, ISPs, and CDNs, to diagnose root causes and answer “why” something is broken.

    Why do I need to monitor the Internet, not just my own infrastructure?

    Most applications now rely on external services, cloud regions, CDNs, and ISPs to reach users. Issues in these layers, like BGP route leaks or CDN edge failures, can degrade performance without triggering any internal alerts. Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM) catches these problems before they impact users.

    How do synthetic testing and real user monitoring (RUM) work together?

    Synthetic testing proactively simulates user interactions from controlled locations to catch issues before real users hit them. RUM captures actual user experience data from production devices and networks. Together, they provide both proactive detection and real-world performance validation.

    What should I include in a network performance baseline?

    A strong baseline includes metrics captured under healthy conditions for each application, region, and service path. Track baseline values alongside long-term trends and seasonal patterns (like time-of-day usage spikes) so you can distinguish genuine degradation from expected fluctuations.

    By Denton Chikura

    Technical Writer

    Denton Chikura is a technical writer and longtime observability advocate focused on helping site reliability engineers and engineering teams discover the tools and capabilities that strengthen internet resilience. He works at the intersection of monitoring, performance, and infrastructure to make complex systems more understandable and usable, bridging the gap between deep technical detail and real‑world operations. His goal is to help teams build faster, detect issues earlier, and recover smarter, ultimately making the internet a better, more reliable place for everyone.

    Disclaimer: The views expressed on this blog are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of LogicMonitor or its affiliates.

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