Proactive Network Monitoring Helps Prevent Network Outages

It has become more evident than ever that network infrastructure and profit go hand in hand. For instance, financial entities count on a sound infrastructure to keep up with market activities in real time. When this infrastructure fails during a crucial transaction or trade, the company might potentially lose millions of precious dollars. Although some bigger institutions could still function even after losing a deal or two, smaller businesses cannot afford taking such a possibly devastating risk which comes from these unexpected network outages.
Te best way to prevent these network outages is through proactive network monitoring. But before you do it, you have to understand first the causes of these outages.
Causes of Network Outages

• Human error

Probably the major cause of these network outages is none other than human error during a device configuration. Your IT staff’s task is to make regular alterations to devices in enterprise-class environments, and even though templates are crucial to this task, there remains to be manual processes which could be prone to error. Accidental unplugging and plugging of a device in the wrong port is another common human error. When you have several VLANs or when the device port has been hard coded for particular device interfaces, you might bring down the whole network while looking for the right port.

• Configuration issues

A good example of configuration issue is a down interface link on the router which can lead to a serious outage. When the link that handles the internet traffic becomes unresponsive, it will cause failure in services such as external traffic and web browsing. Such things are crucial for daily company procedures, and an organization must pinpoint potential configuration problems before they happen.

• Environmental factors

When the data center or computer room becomes overheated because of blown fuse of your HVAC, your equipment could suffer from damage and potential failure. You can avoid such events if your computer has environmental sensors to alert you of breaches in temperature thresholds. It saves you money you might otherwise spend for expensive repairs, downtime in network, and angry customers who lost access to their systems.
How Network Monitoring Prevents Outages
The best network monitoring software employs a proactive approached based on an early detection to avoid these network outages. A solid network monitoring software can achieve three key things:

• Performance monitoring and device discovery

The initial step in mitigating a possible network issue is discovering all devices within the network and their present status. Top of the line network monitoring software must use auto-discovery for finding every device on the network, getting rid of the need for manual device information entry.

• Display status information

This software must provide real time status conditions of devices, which include response time, uptime, packet loss rate, temperature, availability and more.

• Use of smart alert

The network monitoring software must use smart alerting for notifying IT managers once a device reaches a critical threshold. Managers must set up their devices for alerting them once a device is in alarm state for them to remedy the issue before an end user takes notice.

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