Monday, 2 January 2017

The Must-Haves for Your Network Monitoring Needs

When searching for network monitoring solutions, IT administrators have a plethora of options to choose from. There are tons of vendors who flaunt their sets of features, pricing sheets, comparison sheets, supported vendor lists and more on their sites and collaterals. Although these are all great developments for seasoned IT administrators, all the marketing ruckus and overkill on the technical specifications can leave the beginners in total confusion.
Before you settle for any provider, it is best to know the real must-haves to make sure that you will be properly covered no matter what you choose in the end.

Smart Classification and Mapping

Various types of network elements will have different parameters which must be monitored for performance and health. The capacity of network monitoring solutions to smartly categorize devices based to their vendor and type is going to save you lots of time during set up. Another crucial requirement is the ability to come up with custom maps through logical grouping of devices to represent the clustered environments or the geographically distributed resources.

Automatic Discovery

To start managing and monitoring your network, you have to import to the monitoring solution all details of network servers and devices which will be monitored. Initially, the network may seem small but this will grow and continue to incorporate new devices from various vendors so make sure that the network monitoring tool has vendor agnostic multiprotocol discover process. This must also be able to auto discover devices and must have provisions for performing forced discovery of new device or imported list of devices.

Security Management

Although security for the systems and network of the company is a crucial requirement and deserves the attention and care of a different full-fledged team, it is a must that being an IT admin, you need to at least know if there are fraudulent access attempts being made. Through monitoring system log messages, you will be able to easily detect failed attempts of securing files, failed log ins, account lockouts and others. An added benefit is when the network monitoring solution will be able to extend the security monitoring capacities by way of third party utilities or plug-ins.

Intelligent Alerting

As you look into alerting features, a definite must-have is triggering of emails associated with relevant information which can help you in quick correction of network glitches. Some other valuable features include running and triggering remediation programs or scripts, provisions for the escalation of alarms as well as setting of device dependencies for preventing avalanches of alerts. When your company can appreciate workforce mobility, you might also want to know whether the network monitoring tool will be able to alert through SMS and is accessible through smartphones.

Reliability and Scalability

You may have 50 servers today and manage 100 servers the next day for your company. For better spending of your money, it is wise to guarantee that you get a solution which can handle five times the load it should currently take care of.

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