Network monitoring is a critical component of the modern IT industry. With a comprehensive network health and performance perspective, enterprise IT can proactively identify and fix possible issues, ensuring optimal network operation and reducing downtime.
Unchecked, network failures can cause significant disruptions in business operations, lost productivity, and financial losses. For example, network outages might restrict staff from accessing vital resources, disrupt customer interactions, or compromise important data.
In this post, we’ll discuss network monitoring, why it’s vital, and some of the most popular solutions for properly monitoring network devices.
Network monitoring is the process of continuously observing, evaluating, and maintaining the performance and health of a network infrastructure. Monitoring solutions gather data from various network components, including routers, switches, servers, and wireless access points, to gain insight into network traffic, usage, latency, and potential problems.
The primary benefit of network monitoring is the ability to proactively manage and optimize network performance, reducing downtime and ensuring critical services are available. Network monitoring prevents outages, improves response times, and enhances the overall user experience by detecting possible problems before they escalate. Comprehensive tools also provide essential data for capacity planning, allowing organizations to extend their networks more efficiently.
Network monitoring consists of several components that provide an in-depth overview of network health and performance. These components usually include:
These components work together to provide a comprehensive network monitoring solution that enables organizations to effectively manage their network infrastructure.
The importance of network monitoring cannot be overstated, as it plays a crucial role in ensuring the efficiency, security, and reliability of an organization’s IT infrastructure.
Network monitoring can be categorized into several types, each serving a specific purpose. Understanding these types helps organizations choose the right monitoring strategies and tools to meet their specific needs.
Performance monitoring measures and analyzes the overall performance of the network and its components. Monitoring tools track errors (including packet loss), bandwidth (capacity in bits per second), throughput (or speed), and latency (or delays). The purpose is to ensure that the network performs optimally, supporting applications and services without interruption or lag.
Fault monitoring is the process of detecting and identifying network issues or failures, such as device malfunctions, link failures, and configuration errors. This form of monitoring is critical for ensuring network availability and reducing downtimes. When a fault is found, alerts are sent to IT staff so that they can take corrective action.
Availability monitoring guarantees that all network devices and services are functional and available. Periodically verifying the status of network components, availability monitoring helps IT ensure routers, switches, and servers are functional. Availability (the percentage of time a component is available) frequently combines with uptime monitoring (the amount of time a component is operational) to provide a complete picture of network reliability.
Configuration monitoring detects changes to network device configurations, such as firmware updates, software settings, and security policies. This method of monitoring ensures that modifications to the network configuration don’t have a detrimental impact on performance or security. Configuration monitoring also aids in ensuring consistency and conformity with corporate norms.
Businesses continue adding increasingly complex network technologies, from SD-WANs to multi-cloud, containerized applications and services. To support globally dispersed business operations, as well as more and more remote workers, IT teams need end-to-end network visibility. Traditional network monitoring solutions struggle to access and consolidate the data generated by modern networks, not to mention processing that data into meaningful information. Enter network observability and automation.
Modern network observability solutions provide the visibility needed to continuously observe, evaluate, and maintain network performance and health. Automation supports advanced analytics, troubleshooting, and issue remediation, which enable IT teams to move from reactive network monitoring to proactively optimizing network resources, applications, and services, wherever they reside.
Below are some of the most popular network monitoring tools, along with their key features.
Netreo is a network observability platform that gives you complete visibility over IT infrastructure, applications, and services. Unlike typical monitoring solutions, Netreo focuses on observability, which entails collecting, analyzing, and understanding data from several sources to get insights into network performance, health, and behavior.
Netreo reduces network monitoring overhead by using standards-based methods to collect performance data from multiple sources in your IT environment, including SNMP, WMI, APIs, and cloud-native applications.
Key Features:
Nagios is a popular and widely used open-source network monitoring tool. It’s flexible, with a vast plugin ecosystem, making it ideal for monitoring complex IT infrastructures such as networks, servers, and applications.
Nagios provides comprehensive monitoring and alerting solutions for small and large organizations, allowing them to maintain high availability and performance.
Key Features:
Zabbix is an enterprise-grade open-source monitoring tool for IT infrastructure, such as networks, servers, virtual machines, and cloud services. It’s flexible, scalable, and has an extensive feature set, making it a popular choice for businesses of all sizes, whether small or large.
Key Features:
Network monitoring tools help businesses find and resolve issues, improve performance, and reduce downtime by giving real-time visibility into network health. With businesses relying heavily on both internal and external applications, IT teams require network observability solutions with integrated APM capabilities. With the right network observability solution, IT teams get deeper insights into the performance and health of distributed network resources, including cloud-based and on-premises applications and services.
Tools such as Stackify APM and Netreo provide comprehensive monitoring and observability capabilities, with each targeting a distinct area of IT management. When integrated with BMC Helix, these tools provide an effective solution for monitoring and managing complicated, multi-cloud enterprise infrastructures.
Organizations can enhance the reliability and effectiveness of their IT infrastructure by utilizing network monitoring tools, resulting in better business outcomes and customer satisfaction. See how Stackify APM can transform your application performance. Start your free Stackify APM trial today.
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