Network Monitoring - The Must Haves

IT administrators are spoilt for option when looking for network monitoring solutions. We've got quite a few vendors flaunting feature sets, pricing sheets, supported vendor list, comparison sheets etc. on their websites and collaterals. When all they are very good developments for the seasoned IT administrators, the overkill on technical specifications and marketing ballyhoo can leave the not-so-experienced folks in utter confusion. Get extra details about WhyRoute2



Say you're entrusted with obtaining a network monitoring remedy to replace the lots of free tools you may have been using to handle your modest network. How do you go about selecting a resolution? A superb start is always to know what the must-haves are and to ensure you might have it all covered it doesn't matter what you finally finish up deciding upon.



Automatic discovery



To start monitoring and managing your network, you'll ought to import into the monitoring option the facts from the network devices and servers to be monitored. The network may well look modest now nevertheless it will grow and continue to include things like new devices from many vendors, so make sure the network monitoring tool has a vendor-agnostic multi-protocol discovery approach, can auto-discover devices and also has provisions to perform a 'forced' discovery of a new device/ imported list of devices.



Smart classification & mapping



Different types of network elements - servers, routers, switches, firewalls and so forth., will have different parameters that really need to be monitored for health and performance. The ability of a network monitoring answer to smartly categorize the devices according to their type and vendor will save one a lot of time during set-up. Another important requirement is being able to make custom maps by logically grouping devices to represent clustered environments or geographically distributed resources.



In-depth performance monitoring



One could easily get lost deciding on what to monitor to make sure 100% availability and top performance of your network. If you have been using numerous free tools, a superb begin is ensuring the network monitoring resolution covers all that your free tools provided. Availability and basic performance parameters can be monitored using SNMP for most of IT infrastructure, of majority vendors. If your infrastructure consists of a mixture of Windows and Linux-based servers, WMI/ CLI (Telnet/ SSH connections) based monitoring capabilities provide an easy means of in-depth performance monitoring for these devices. Ability to monitor traffic flows is also an essential that brings you insights into how your network bandwidth is being consumed, a must for troubleshooting network slowness.



Security management



Although security for the company's network and systems is a critical requirement and deserves the care and attention of another full-fledged team, it is important that as an IT admin, one at least knows when fraudulent access attempts are made. By monitoring system log messages that incorporate Windows Event Logs, Syslogs on Unix-based devices, Firewall logs and so on., you get to easily know of failed log-ins, failed attempts to secure files, account lock-outs and so on.. An added advantage is if the network monitoring option can extend its security monitoring capabilities by way of plug-ins or third party utilities.



Intelligent alerting



Though investigating on alerting features, a must-have is triggering of emails attached with relevant facts that can help you quickly correct network glitches. Other value features consist of triggering and running remediation scripts or programs, provisions for escalation of alarms and setting of device dependencies to prevent those avalanches of alerts. If your company appreciates workforce mobility then you'll also want to check out if the network monitoring tool can alert via SMS and be accessed via smartphones. Latest along these lines is OpManager, a network monitoring software that even allows managing of alarms via Twitter Direct Messages.



Scalability & Reliability



Today you could have 50 servers and the very next day you could be managing 100 servers on the company adding a brand new branch. For the buck spent, it is wise to make sure you get a resolution that can handle 5x the load it should presently take care of. Other questions if your company is very serious on having round-the-clock monitoring: Can the monitoring solution alert if the server on which it is hosted fails? Can a redundant failover server take up monitoring tasks and revert when the main server is back up?