Best Practices to Follow for an Effective Network Monitoring

With your network being the core of all your operations, it only makes sense to ensure that everything runs smoothly and you receive early warning when potential problems arise. Optimize your network by following these tips on how to implement an effective network monitoring strategy.

Be Familiar with Every Nook and Corner

For an effective management of your IT environment, the first step is to have a good understanding of the devices that compose your network. Most tools can do it for you through conducting an automated discovery of switches, servers, routers, security as well as other IP devices. While it might be a more manual process, it will help to retain an updated inventory of all your managed elements. Network inventory management is the primary secret for effective network monitoring, understanding everything in your network and how it changes in time for you to pinpoint possible issues and causes of decreased network performance.

Monitor All Layers

It is essential to use a monitoring system which supports several technologies for monitoring all layers. Only then will you gain a better insight and understanding of whether your performance issues are a server, network, a bandwidth issue, routing problem, hardware or software malfunction. Every element within the network can contribute to data transfer functions at any of the layers. You need complete visibility of the whole system for an effective monitoring.

Problem Alerts Should be Directed to the Right Person

One of the biggest reasons why network problems take place is because of none other than human error. IT teams get busier than ever while being pressured to respond and prioritize problems on the network. There are times when monitoring alerts triggered by a certain problem go unresolved or ignored, especially in teams in large enterprises where there are often multiple administrators.

Organizations, whether large or small, can benefit from the alert escalation matrix which can give an exact detail of who takes care of things at a specific time. On this plan, the person administering the network element which encounters an issue will get an alert. If the person is not available, the matrix will decide how to escalate the alert depending on the resolution service or severity levels. Implementation of a carefully thought out matrix on escalation prevents small problems from growing to large scale organizational wide issues.

Configuration and Change Management

A network management technology must be configured to specifically address the needs of a certain environment. If this doesn’t happen, problems on the network will take place. Even the tiniest mistakes on configuration can lead to data loss or network downtime.

You have to set parameters you want to manage, thresholds you expect systems an devices to meet and configure systems and devices to send data to the management tools or let management tools acquire data from the system and device logs.  Change and configuration management is a proactive aspect of network monitoring which prevents the occurrence of issues on the network.

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