Why Network Monitoring?

To know more about what’s happening on your own network, you must improve your network monitoring capabilities. Network monitoring solutions keep an eye on the traffic, devices, and servers on the educational or corporate networks and notify the network administrators when some things go wrong. It is the key weapon in the toolbox of a network manager for issues n troubleshooting network.

Basically, network monitoring encompasses things from simple scripts that are home-grown, which ping hosts to check whether they are available to distributed enterprise apps with the agents on different clients and hosts.

Network monitoring solutions can keep track of bandwidth usage and network traffic. It may check whether important network components including servers, routers, and switches are down or up. Generally, network managers can set thresholds for an acceptable performance and once the software finds slow throughput, unavailable devices, high error rates or slow response time, it may send alerts to the administrators through SMS text message or email. The advanced systems may also send alerts to the remote administrators through mental telepathy or carrier pigeon, even if the cost to maintain the pigeon lofts as well as keep telepaths on employee is prohibited for majority of the organizations.

Among the areas, which network monitoring solutions could track include web servers, email servers, network traffic, WAN links, DNS servers, storage devices, virtual machines, network-hosted databases, and cloud services. It may check on both response and availability time. Several packages handle SLA or service level agreement and QoS or quality of service monitoring. Aside from providing alerts, other applications provide graphical reporting, which displays a dashboard that illustrates relevant statistics, which offer a single glass plane with which to deal with the whole infrastructure.

Network monitoring apps vary in their ease of use. While there are several who offer command-line interface with basic alerts, there are others that take advantage of a GUI or graphical user interface to manage both viewing results and setting alerts. There are times that the interface uses proprietary program that runs on a client on local network. Numerous network monitoring tools also offer a web interface to manage the app. There are others provide mobile device interface, which may manage and set alerts and display graphs or snapshots of monitored elements.

Software for network monitoring is a system administration tool and not just a security tool. Never be confused this with IDS or intrusion detection systems or IPS or intrusion prevention systems. Even if both of such tools for network monitor do keep track of everything involved in the network, the difference lies on the aim to improve security while network monitoring solution addresses network administration and management.

Network monitoring software may differ widely in cost. There are organizations that cobble together the homegrown solutions for nothing that the cost of the time this takes to develop them while the licenses for the enterprise software may cost hundreds and thousands of dollars depending on the number of the devices and users being monitored.

For more information please see this Best Network Monitoring Tools & Software