Wednesday, 21 June 2017

Common Practices for Network Monitoring

Having network monitoring and management strategy in place for a network is as crucial as network implementation and design. Without the existence of network monitoring, a well-designed and planned network may be brought down by the smallest problems.

Whenever you are implementing network monitoring solutions, there are several common practices that you should follow. Such common practices help define the basic strategy to begin with the information on the parameters and nodes that have to be monitored. It doesn’t mean that network monitoring is limited to such common practices. These common practices define the basics, which are part of network monitoring. Aside from the common practices, network administrators have to understand the requirements and design of the network and can implement other monitoring strategies to bring all elements and metrics in the network under their purview.

Availability monitoring defines monitoring of every resource in IT infrastructure to ensure they’re available in catering to the organization’s requirements and its users. The IT infrastructure today needs 100% uptime to meet the demands of businesses. The services offered and the network has to be available always to ensure business continuity. It’s where availability monitoring might help.
Monitoring of the services and resources continuously ensures that the service or node is up and operating and available to meet the needs. Several examples of the availability monitoring include monitoring the devices in the network to make sure that the network is trouble-free, availability of the storage space to store the organizational data, availability of bandwidth to ensure the delivery of data, monitoring the service’s system level to ensure critical applications operating smoothly, and many more.

There are different kinds of interfaces utilized in the network including Gigabit Ethernet and Fast Ethernet to high speed fiber channel interfaces. The interface on the device is the exit and entry point for the packets that offer a service to the organization. If there’s an error, interface goes down or packet loss, it may result to poor quality experience.

Interface monitoring basically involves monitoring interfaces on the device for packet loss, errors, discards, utilization limits, and many more. The information from the interface monitoring will help determine possible network problems that are due to service performance or poor application. The network monitoring systems take advantage of SNMP or ping to collect the interface statistics from the network devices. While the ping utilizing ICMP packets reports on the interface stats including round trip time, packet loss, the SNMP based data collection can help monitor the interface bandwidth utilization.

The network involves a lot of hardware devices including the devices used for switching and routing, connectivity, storage, application servers, and so on. The hardware forms the IT infrastructure’s backbone. If the hardware crucial to daily operations of the network fails, this could lead to network downtime. For instance, faulty power supply on core switch or over heating of edge router may cause network outrage. To ensure network’s smooth functioning, it’s essential to monitor the performance and health of the hardware devices in the network.


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