Network Monitoring System | SolarWinds

What is a network monitoring system?

Network monitoring is the practice of continuously monitoring a network and its components for performance issues, failures, or deficiencies. Even the most well-designed network isn’t immune to slowdowns, and proactive monitoring helps you stay up to date on what’s going on in your network, so you can resolve performance issues or bottlenecks before they become full-fledged outages affecting end users.

You can use network monitoring systems to automate the most time-consuming and labor-intensive aspects of network monitoring, maximize your time and effort, and uncover key insights you might have missed with manual network monitoring. 

Why should I monitor my network?

The primary reason you should monitor your network is to proactively reduce downtime. Occasional periods of downtime are inevitable, but repeated failures and outages can be costly. IT downtime can cost businesses millions per year, while IT teams can easily spend days fixing a single downtime issue. It’s much more effective to prevent downtime from occurring in the first place whenever possible.

Network monitoring keeps you up to date on what’s going in your network, so you’re better able to spot, diagnose, and fix issues before they cause downtime. Network monitoring also ensures uptime by helping you make sure your systems stay healthy and available.

Other benefits of network monitoring include:

• Reducing operating costs
• Visualizing your network performance
• Facilitating proactive maintenance

   

What are some key features of a network monitoring system?

Network monitoring systems can be divided into three main types: active, passive, and performance. Active network monitoring systems display a network’s immediate health by routinely running tests and waiting for a response, while passive network monitoring systems only alert when a certain event has been logged, like an SNMP trap. Performance monitors collect long-term data from your network and display it in various ways for analysis. In contrast to active and passive network monitoring systems, performance monitors are typically focused on the longer term.

Admins often use a combination of these solutions to get a clear overview of system health. The best network monitoring systems share these five core features:

1. Discovery: Automatically searching for all devices and applications on your network
2. Monitoring: Consistently monitoring all network devices, applications, and wireless access points and paying attention to critical metrics like uptime or disk space
3. Visualization or Mapping: Mapping out connections between elements within your network to offer ultimate end-to-end visibility and improve analysis
4. Reporting and Alerting: Generating historical and comparative reports of network performance and sending real-time notifications when performance issues occur
5. Analysis: Offering special features to aid troubleshooting and help you drill down on root causes 

What are network monitoring best practices?

Here are six top network monitoring best practices for admins.

1. Establish performance baselines: Making a note of how your network performs over a couple of
   weeks or even a few months will help you understand what “normal” is for your network. Once you know your
   network’s normal, you’ll notice when performance is slower than usual and be able to troubleshoot much faster.
2. Create an escalation plan: Sometimes in large businesses, small network issues become big
   network issues because alerts are ignored or the right person doesn’t know there’s a problem. To prevent this,
   set up a policy that clearly lays out who must be alerted when a problem is detected. This helps ensure nothing
   falls through the cracks.
3. Consider every layer: A failure can happen at any time and at any layer within your network. As
   such, you should use a network monitoring system to support multiple devices on multiple levels, making problem
   detection easier.
4. Combine High Availability (HA) with failover options: If your network monitoring system is set
   up in the network itself, it can go down with the network if there’s a widespread malfunction. High Availability
   (HA) ensures your network monitoring system doesn’t have a single point of failure, so even if the entire
   network goes down, you’ll still be able to retrieve your data and start troubleshooting. It’s best to set up a
   failover system at a remote DR site.
5. Follow configuration management best practices: Most network performance issues stem from
   incorrect configurations. For example, if a user adds a new service to the network and adds new firewall rules,
   the rules might end up blocking a business-critical application somewhere else in the network. Effective
   configuration management can help admins keep track of what changes have been made in the network and ensure
   there are no conflicts.
6. Don’t forget about capacity planning: When selecting a network monitoring system, make sure you
   give yourself room for growth. Starting with a small-scale solution and upgrading later can be more expensive in
   the long run.

How to monitor a network

Every network is different and specific network monitoring protocols will be different as well. At the very least, every admin should monitor network speed, availability, and usage. These three factors are essential indicators of any network’s health.

If there’s an issue with network speed, you’ll probably notice it first. Bandwidth monitoring with a network monitoring system will alert you to bottlenecks and slowdowns before they start affecting end users. Monitoring network availability ensures everyone within your enterprise continues to have access to essential services like email. Finally, if you suspect one application is using up more resources than necessary and compromising other applications or devices on the network, usage monitoring will confirm it.

Beyond that, network monitoring comes down to keeping an eye on key metrics, using a network monitoring system to help you perform sophisticated analysis, and diligently following network monitoring best practices.

How to use a network monitoring system to improve the performance of my network

A network monitoring system can help you improve the performance of your network by offering end-to-end visibility. The first step to improving performance is getting a clear picture of what’s going on in your network, and only a network monitoring system can discover network devices, perform cross-stack network data correlation, uncover connections using hop-by-hop analysis for on-premises, hybrid, and cloud services, and measure network health on a large scale.

Once you’ve gathered all this information, you’re better equipped to tackle network performance issues. You can make sure your network is configured properly, isolate root causes, identify and eliminate bottlenecks, drill down on resource usage, and more.