What is Network Monitoring?
Network Monitoring, a subset of network management, is a systematic attempt by a computer network to identify slow or failing components before they cause problems. For example, crashed, frozen, or overloaded servers; failed switches; failing routers; and other troublesome components can all potentially cause outages or network failures. Should some problem arise and trigger an outage, it is the role of the network monitoring system to alert the network administrator in a timely way.
Why we need Network Monitoring in our organization?
Network monitoring systems provide optimize a network’s performance, solve attacking problems, and prevent you from developing problems by identifying slowdowns and collecting performance data. One of the apparent benefits of a network monitoring system is its potential to identify malicious network behavior.
Features of Network Monitoring
Real-time performance metrics
Network monitoring solutions, at their core, continuously observe a network to find and proactively report on performance issues. In order to successfully address those problems, the tool needs to deliver metrics on network performance in real-time. The sooner the solution delivers insights on how a user’s business network is functioning and how to fix series issues, the better.
Automatic device discovery
If a network monitoring tool hopes to be effective, it needs to have a clear picture of every single device and connection on a network. Network monitoring solutions must include device discovery capabilities that allow the platform to begin monitoring new nodes. Preferably, your network monitoring tool will automatically discover devices as they’re added to the network, saving users from having to manually sweep for added devices.
Intelligent alerts
While half of a network monitoring solution’s job is to discover performance issues, the other (perhaps more important) half is alerting its users to the problem. Your monitoring tool needs to deliver intelligent real-time alerts on issues that it finds and notify the right network engineer or administrator. Alerts need to provide the right information, including location and severity, and prioritize more crucial problems.
Issue diagnosis and root cause analysis
To ensure that users are able to properly address network performance issues, network monitoring solutions need to provide diagnosis and root cause analysis on problems it discovers. That way, companies can save time on manually figuring out what the issue is and go straight to fixing the problem. Ultimately, this leads to users being able to tackle more network performance issues.
Network maps
Since network monitoring tools have a picture of every device connected to a network, they’re able to draw a visual representation of what the network looks like. These network maps allow administrators to look at an abstraction of their network, which is essential for enterprises with sprawling, complex networks. The best network maps contain visual information on nodes and devices, letting users instantly see performance issues at a glance.
Customizable dashboards
Modern network monitoring solutions typically come equipped with dashboards that display performance metrics, but depending on how much information the dashboard displays, it might be difficult to find the metrics important to your business. Customizable network monitoring dashboards allow users to determine what metrics they see and how they’re displayed, reducing the time wasted searching for relevant information.
Natural scalability
Networks are not a static tool; many businesses constantly expand or consolidate networks to match company growth, and network devices are replaced constantly. As such, your network monitoring tool needs to be able to scale naturally alongside your network as it changes. Some network monitoring tools allow for an unlimited number of devices, but others may designate specific payment plans for networks with a certain number of nodes.
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