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Network monitoring - A brief overview
The term "network monitoring" is often used in the IT sector. All networking components, including routers, switches, firewalls, servers, and virtual machines (VMs), are regularly reviewed to maintain and maximize their availability while being monitored for faults and performance. Proactively locating performance problems and bottlenecks aids in early problem detection. In addition, network failures or downtime can be avoided with effective proactive monitoring.
There are four aspects of network monitoring -
- Monitoring essentials: Network performance is impacted by faulty network hardware. Early discovery of this can prevent it, which is why network device monitoring is crucial. Identifying the devices and the relevant performance metrics to be monitored is the first step in efficient network monitoring. Choosing the monitoring interval is the second step. While servers, routers, and switches carry out business-essential functions but have specific parameters that may be selectively monitored, PCs and printers are not critical and do not need frequent monitoring.
- Monitoring interval: The frequency at which network devices and the metrics associated with them are surveyed to ascertain their state in terms of performance and availability is known as the monitoring interval. Setting up monitoring intervals helps ease the strain on your resources and the network monitoring and reporting tools. The interval is determined by the kind of network device or metric being tracked. Device availability statuses need to be checked at least once per minute, if not more frequently. Once every five minutes, CPU and RAM statistics can be restricted. Other indicators, such as disc utilization, can have their monitoring intervals extended, and it is sufficient to query them once every 15 minutes.
- Protocol and types: To reduce the impact on network performance when monitoring a network and its devices, it is generally recommended to use a secure, low-bandwidth network management protocol. Most network devices, Linux servers, and Windows devices support the SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) and CLI protocols. One of the extensively used network protocols for managing and watching over network components is SNMP. An SNMP agent is typically included with network components. To connect with the network management system, they only need to be enabled and configured (NMS). One can have total control over the device by granting SNMP read-write access. One can change the device's whole settings via SNMP.
- Setting thresholds: Money can be lost due to network downtime. The end-user often notifies the network management team of a problem with the network. This is due to a subpar proactive enterprise network monitor strategy. Finding performance bottlenecks early on is the main problem of real-time network monitoring. Thresholds are crucial in network monitoring at this point. The business use case's threshold restrictions change from device to device.
You can read up about network monitoring in more detail in this article.
What features should your network monitoring software have?
The following are some characteristics to look for in network monitoring software:
- Automatic discovery
- Smart classification and mapping
- Security management
- In-depth performance monitoring
- Scalability
- Intelligent alerting
You can read about all the points mentioned above in this article.
