Network latency and jitter are crucial metrics for understanding and maintaining network performance. They help IT technicians diagnose issues, optimize configurations, and ensure that applications; especially those requiring real-time communication (audio, video); perform reliably and efficiently. Auvik Network Management (ANM) provides these metrics, by the Auvik collector local to each of the devices on the network sending ping probes to measure these values and plot them on a time series graph.
What are Latency and Jitter?
Latency and Jitter widget on the Device Dashboard
Latency measures how long it takes (in milliseconds) for one data packet to travel from the source device to a destination and back
- depends on connection type and distance
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Latency Calculation: If a ping to a device shows:
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Echo request sent at 10:00:00.000
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Echo reply received at 10:00:00.045
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The latency is 45 milliseconds.
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Jitter (also known as Packet Delay Variation) is the variance of latencies experienced over a given period of time
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Jitter Calculation: Jitter can be computed as the average deviation from the mean latency of a series of packets. If multiple latency measurements are taken, jitter can be calculated as the average of the absolute differences between consecutive latency measurements.
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For example, if two consecutive packets have latencies: 50ms, 55ms
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Differences: |55-50| = 5ms
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The Jitter is 5ms
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Note: The higher the jitter score, the more inconsistent response times are, which manifests in choppy calls or glitchy-sounding looking video quality. i.e results in bad UX for users. This means measuring this provides great insights to IT technicians.
Commands such as ping and traceroutecan be used. Ping sends an Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) echo request to a target host and measures the time it takes to receive an echo reply, which represents the round-trip time (RTT).
Alerting on Latency and Jitter
User can now define the alerts using latency and jitter and get alerted when conditions are met.
For how to set up alerts on latency and jitter, click here.
Latency and Jitter widget is shown on all those devices where we currently show the online status and device bandwidth graph.
As a result, the following device types do NOT show the latency/jitter graph:
- PRINTER
- UPS
- IP_PHONE
- PHONE
- TABLET
- HANDHELD
- TELECOMMUNICATIONS
- CAMERA