How to Monitor Network and Zoom Performance & Fix “Your Internet Connection is Unstable” on Zoom
Laggy video, packet loss, and jitter make it difficult to have a clear and coherent conversion over Zoom — which is why it’s important to identify these issues before your next call. In this article, we’re teaching you how to monitor network performance and Zoom performance to help you have the clearest Zoom experience, and avoid the “Your Internet Connection is Unstable” message of doom.
Table of Contents
- Why Monitor Zoom Network Performance?
- How to Monitor Zoom Network Performance
- Continuously Monitor Zoom Network Performance
- Expand Your Network Monitoring Setup
Many of us now rely on Zoom, and applications like it, to help us communicate with colleagues, clients, and even friends and family — so we need Zoom to perform as well as possible.
Zoom’s popularity has skyrocketed over the past year. It’s not only an application that we use for convenience, but for many of us, it is an application we rely on for everyday conversation.
VoIP Quality and unified communication applications, like Zoom, can be drastically impacted by poor network performance. So monitoring end-to-end network performance to identify network issues in your network will help you improve your Zoom performance and allow you to address Zoom issues like unstable internet connection.
Why Monitor Zoom Network Performance
Network problems can affect so many different parts of your network, from your Internet, VoIP, firewall, and UC applications, like Zoom.
The best way to avoid network problems interrupting your Zoom meetings is to continuously monitor network performance to measure network metrics like jitter, packet loss, latency and packet reordering, and proactively identify problems that may make an appearance during Zoom meetings.
In a previous article, we go over the 7 reasons to monitor network performance — in this article, we’re going to summarize some of the benefits of monitoring network and Zoom performance.
Fix “Your Internet Connection is Unstable” on Zoom
Anyone using Zoom has undoubtedly seen this message at least once. If your Zoom connection is unstable, freezing, buffering and disconnecting will happen and you’ll see a message pop up that says “Your Internet Connection is Unstable.”
The quality of the Internet connection is what makes or breaks Zoom meetings. When you see that message, you know that things are not running smoothly.
The symptoms of an unstable connection when using Zoom can include:
- Jitter
- Packet Loss
- Frozen screens
- Poor quality audio and video
- Meeting disconnection
When this happens, our instinct is to panic and blindly try different solutions to improve our Internet connection. But what’s actually causing such poor connectivity?
Monitoring your network performance with a software like Obkio helps you address Zoom Internet connection problems by monitoring your network performance during your calls, and showing you clearly when a network problem occurred, why it happened, and what part of your network is responsible.
Because, despite the message, the “Your Internet Connection is Unstable” notification doesn’t necessarily mean your Internet is the main culprit.
Is the Network affecting Zoom?
So we already know that network performance can affect Zoom performance, but how can you know for sure?
It’s not always clear if a problem is located in your business’ network, in your service provider’s network, or somewhere else entirely. We’ve all been on one of these never-ending conference calls with Service Providers where everyone seems to be pointing fingers and blaming someone else.
By using a performance monitoring solution and deploying Monitoring Agents in strategic locations, you can clearly identify if a problem is network-related, and if so, where a network problem is coming from.
For example, Zoom is supported by AWS, and has been since 2011. This means that problems within AWS’s network can affect your Zoom application. Although you may not be an AWS customer yourself, if you’re having problems with your Zoom performance, these issues may be affecting a range of other applications and sites using AWS.
Monitoring your AWS and network performance will help you determine if your network is affecting Zoom, and if so, how.
Point Where Network Issues Are Located
Network issues can occur in many different parts of your network. So when you’re looking to troubleshoot, you need to know where to start.
A Network Performance Monitoring software like Obkio, will monitor end-to-end network performance using Monitoring Agents strategically placed at different locations to provide you with information on:
- The cause and source of the network problems.
- Where and when they happened.
- And who is responsible for fixing it.
In our case study with Station 22, high CPU usage on their Firewall was actually affecting the performance of VoIP and UC applications (Microsoft Teams in their case), causing severe choppiness and packet loss.
So sometimes, you never know where the network problems are coming from, and what they may affect.
Troubleshoot Network Problems Before Your Next Zoom Meeting
Once you’ve collected information about any issues affecting your Zoom performance, you can start troubleshooting! With a proactive network monitoring software, you can identify problems right as they happen, even before your end-users start experiencing them.
Apps like Zoom are constantly being utilized, especially nowadays, so if any problems arise, they’ll be very obvious during your next virtual meeting.
With the data you’ve collected, you can then determine who needs to solve the problems affecting your Zoom performance, whether it’s your internal IT team, your ISP, or AWS.
For more information on troubleshooting network problems, check out our article on Network Troubleshooting.
How to Monitor Zoom Network Performance
Now, we’re going to run you through the steps for monitoring network and Zoom performance, including how to troubleshoot “Your Internet Connection is Unstable” on Zoom.
1. Choose a Network Performance Monitoring Software
To continuously monitor your network and Zoom performance, we recommend using a Network Performance Monitoring software, like Obkio to do the work for you.
A network monitoring software can continuously monitor end-to-end network performance and identify network issues for you.
You can get started with Obkio’s free trial, or choose an Obkio plan and follow our Getting Started Documentation.
2. Create A Public Monitoring Agent
To begin monitoring network performance with Obkio, you need to deploy Monitoring Agents which continuously run tests to measure network and application performance.
Choose an Agent
As mentioned earlier, Zoom is supported by AWS. It leverage AWS’s global infrastructure, storage, content distribution, and security to deliver its services.
So when you’re looking to monitor Zoom network performance, use a Public Monitoring Agent hosted within Amazon’s AWS platform. This would be Obkio’s AWS Public Monitoring Agent.
AWS’ Public Monitoring Agents are hosted and maintained by Obkio in the AWS cloud infrastructure, which means that they can be deployed within seconds.
For more information about deploying Public Monitoring Agents, refer to our Getting Started Documentation.
Choose the Right Agent Location
Zoom leverages Amazon’s AWS infrastructure and therefore stores customer data in Amazon’s global cloud locations. So when you’re looking to monitor the performance of these apps, it’s important to choose a Public Monitoring Agent which has been deployed in the Data Center located closest to the AWS Data Center closest to you.
To learn how to find the AWS Data Center location used by your Zoom, check out our article on How to Identify the Zoom Data Center Location on AWS Infrastructure.
If you’re using a Pro, Business, Enterprise or Education account, you can choose your Data Center in the Zoom settings. Learn how to do this in this Zoom documentation.
Deploy More than 2 Agents
We recommend deploying a minimum of more than two Agents to more accurately compare data.
Many other applications, like Zoom, use cloud providers like Google Cloud, AWS and Azure to function. Even if you’re not a client of these providers yourself, monitoring the performance of these cloud apps can help you identify if the problems you’re experiencing are local, or if they’re happening within AWS’ network, for example, and therefore affecting a variety of different applications and sites using AWS.
For example, if you’re monitoring Zoom network performance between your head office and your Internet, use one Agent in your Head Office and 2 Agents to monitor Internet performance (example, an Azure Agent and an AWS Agent).
This way, if you have a network problem, you can easily see if that same problem is affecting all your sites or just one.
If the problem is affecting all your sites, having Agents allows you to collect the most accurate data to troubleshoot, as well as create a comparison point.
3. Start Monitoring!
Once you’ve set up your AWS Public Monitoring Agent and finished all the steps in our Getting Started Tutorial, you’re all set! You can now continuously monitor the network performance of your Zoom application.
So next time “Your Internet Connection is Unstable,” you’ll know exactly why.
Continuously Monitor Zoom Network Performance
Once set up, Obkio’s network monitoring agents will exchange data packets every 500ms to continuously monitor network metrics like latency, jitter, packet loss, and measure VoIP Quality with MOS Score.
Obkio can then detect outages within 5 seconds and network degradation within a minute. So Obkio can identify the exact moment that your Internet connection becomes unstable, according to Zoom, and why it happened.
You can also go back in time and see the exact network performance for your Zoom application every minute of the previous week with historical data, and create a network performance baseline.
You can also leverage other Obkio tools to collect troubleshooting data:
- Device Monitoring: As we mentioned earlier from our Station 22 case study, even firewall problems, like high CPU usage, can affect UC apps like Zoom. If you’re experiencing any local network problems for Zoom, use Obkio’s Network Device Monitoring solution to monitor and find network problems associated with Firewalls, Routers, Switches, Wifi APs and any SNMP-enabled devices.
- Traceroutes: Traceroutes are a powerful tool to help you collect more information about network problems. For more detail about performance and potential network issues, Obkio also executes Traceroutes periodically in both directions to identify hop-by-hop issues and to keep track of the historical latency between hops.
- Speed Tests: Obkio’s monitoring setup also allows you to schedule automatic speed tests between the Monitoring Agents to test the available throughput on the connection between your on-premise infrastructure and the Zoom, or AWS cloud.
Expand Your Network Monitoring Setup
You’re ready to start monitoring! You won’t need to worry about freezing or lagging during your next client call over Zoom.
Now that you have your monitoring setup in place, it’s extremely easy to install more agents in branch offices, data centers and other clouds providers to monitor network performance.
- If you’re also using Microsoft apps like Teams, Office 365 and Azure, check out our article on How to Monitor Network Connectivity to Microsoft Teams, Office 365 & Azure.
- If you’re using Google apps like Google Meet, Google Workspace, Gmail and Google Calendar, check out our article on How to Monitor Google Network Performance: Google Meet, Google Workspace, Gmail and Google Calendar.
- For advanced cloud users using private connectivity, check out other articles about Monitoring Azure Expressroute Network Performance, and Monitoring AWS Direct Connect!
If you haven’t already, get a free trial of Obkio’s Network Performance Monitoring Solution today!
Originally published at https://obkio.com.
