So... What's the Internet up to Today

For NICE CXone and a host of other services that businesses utilize today, the Internet is absolutely vital. NICE CXone agents using myAgent, and supervisors using inTouch or the Webmanager tools, depend on a stable reliable Internet connection for proper and efficient operation. Fortunately, the Internet today has become very fast and very reliable. However when problems do occur, connectivity is lost, and agents are affected (for example, the MENU and other buttons on the myAgent are grayed out and not working) the problem can be any where, including the agents computer, the customers network switches or routers, the high speed data connection between the customer and their ISP or somewhere out in the Internet itself. Finally, we at NICE CXone maintain a constant vigil on our own network to ensure it is operating correctly. All these touch points mean that troubleshooting network problems can be very difficult. I wrote recently about a suite of products made by Solarwinds that I recommend to all our customers so that they can monitor and maintain their internal networks. Today I would like, to speak a bit about a tool that is free and available to anyone on the Internet. It is the Internet Health Report by Keynote, at https://www.internetpulse.net/. This is a great page that shows Internet connectivity health between Tier 1 ISPs such as ATT, Cogent, Internap, Level 3, NTT, Qwest, Savvis, SBC, Sprint, Verizon and XO. This page reports performance metrics relative to the connectivity between these various ISPs. It reports latency, packet loss and availability between each of these ISPs and is easy to read and understand. We use it to keep an eye on the Internet outside of our own network and we have found it to be both accurate and timely in reporting problems that are occurring on the Internet in near real time. I want to go on the record and say that if you depend on the Internet for your business, this is a page you will want to include in your favorites or even have displayed on a monitor at all times. Having timely information about Internet problems, can save you a great deal of time and confusion and help direct your actions for faster and more effective trouble resolution. If your agents are reporting problems, and you check the Internet Health Report and see that your ISP is all RED, that might be a clue that your problems may, at their root, be your ISP and you can begin your trouble resolution by focusing on that. Information has been said to be the currency of our day. Knowing the metrics that indicate the health of your data services is valuable information indeed.