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What are network monitoring tools?

Network monitoring tools are tools to help admins streamline, automate, and optimize network monitoring best practices.

As more devices, endpoints, applications, and servers are added to account for rapidly changing business needs, network monitoring can become more complex and nearly impossible to do manually.

When end users report an error or performance issue, it’s important to find the problem as quickly as possible—but is the problem being caused by an application, too many users, an overall network issue, or something else entirely? How can you easily filter out the noise to pinpoint the true cause of a bottleneck?

To resolve issues quickly, you can use a range of network monitoring tools with pinpointed functions to troubleshoot more effectively. Network monitoring tools should be able to execute the following tasks to help you streamline and optimize your network monitoring best practices:

• Visualize your entire network and perform network diagnostics and network discovery
• Constantly monitor your network and send out detailed alerts when performance issues are detected
• Facilitate faster troubleshooting by making it easier to drill down on root causes
• Alert in real time

Network administrator monitoring tools are designed to offer admins the data and metrics necessary to help keep networks healthy.

What is network monitoring?

Network monitoring refers to the practice of routinely checking a network for failures or performance issues, troubleshooting and solving these issues when they occur, and taking proactive measures to prevent problems in the future.

Networks are no longer flat with only a few elements you can manage manually—they’re complex systems with many interconnecting applications, routers, servers, firewalls, devices, and more. Network monitoring can help make sure everything within the network is functioning at its highest capacity.

Network monitoring should also include checking hardware health to make sure critical appliances stay online. Relevant metrics include CPU utilization, temperature, fan speed, and power supply.

Tracking availability is also important for comprehensive network monitoring, which includes observing the resources within a system to make sure they’re available to meet requirements and strive for 100% uptime. Some technologies designed to help with availability monitoring are Ping, SNMP, WMI, IPSLA, and Telnet.

What are the benefits of network monitoring?

Network monitoring is an extremely important but often complex task. Admins know you can’t monitor your network once a month or even once every two weeks—a network must be monitored constantly to keep it healthy, which is why manual network monitoring can be too time-consuming and labor-intensive to be effective.

Benefits of network monitoring include helping you:

• Visualize everything going on in your network
• Make sure your network is running as efficiently as possible
• Protect your network against security threats
• Troubleshoot performance issues as quickly as possible
• Provide a consistently high quality of service to end users by keeping network slowdowns to a minimum
• Ensure network resources are being appropriately used, managed, and distributed
• Account for the rapidly changing needs of a scaling enterprise
• Meet SLA requirements and ensure customer satisfaction

Using network monitoring tools can help you more easily follow these network monitoring best practices.

Which product should I choose for my network? NPM or ETS?

Two of the most popular network monitoring tools from SolarWinds are Network Performance Monitor (NPM) and Engineer’s Toolset. Both tools are designed to help you meet your network monitoring needs, but which one of these monitoring tools are better for network engineers to choose?

NPM provides comprehensive monitoring on two different levels: devices that support SNMP and devices that don’t support SNMP. NPM is built to offer more detailed network management information for devices supporting SNMP, including network latency, packet loss, and network traffic statistics. NPM can also provide network latency and packet loss information for devices that don’t support SNMP.

NPM is ideal for:

• Multi-vendor network monitoring
• Network troubleshooting
• Network performance and availability monitoring
• Graphing results in real-time
• Pinpointing high-traffic nodes
• Generating custom reports and alerts
• Alerting on over 150 network instances
• Publishing charts and reports online

Read more about NPM features.

SolarWinds ETS is designed to provide a range of detailed network statistics to help facilitate better analysis, troubleshooting, and provide more granular diagnostics. This solution is ideal for networks with less than 500 network elements, data retention shorter than 30 days, and/or a 2GB limit of stored data.

However, if your network has more than 500 elements, data retention needs longer than 30 days, and unlimited storage, we recommend upgrading to Network Performance Monitor. This network monitoring tool can provide robust support for these elements and includes an intuitive web-based interface.

Choosing between Network Performance Monitor and Engineer’s Toolset can depend on the size of your network, how long you want to retain network data, and what other features you may need. While NPM is designed to be more robust and with more advanced features, ETS is excellent for short-term monitoring and includes over 60 network engineer’s monitoring and management tools.

What monitoring tools are included in ETS?

SolarWinds Engineer’s Toolset combines over 60 of the most essential network software in one collection. This comprehensive solution takes the guesswork out of finding great tools and helps you manage, troubleshoot, and optimize your network with ease.

Some of the most popular network monitoring tools in the toolset are:

1. Network Diagnostics With Advanced Ping: Monitor your network in real time.
2. Network Interface Monitor: View router and server statistics simultaneously.
3. CPU Load Monitor: Monitor and graph CPU load and receive alerts when your network load is approaching critical levels.
4. Router CPU Load: Monitor CPU load for multiple Cisco routers simultaneously.
5. Bandwidth Gauge: Measure bandwidth statistics for any network device.
6. CPU Gauge: Use SNMP to measure CPU load of routers, servers, and computers.
7. NetFlow Real-Time Tool: Analyze NetFlow data.
8. Proxy Ping: Execute ping tests on SNMP-enabled devices.
9. SNMP Device Performance Tool: Collect and view performance data for any SNMP-enabled device.
10. TraceRoute: Trace and analyze network paths between devices.
11. Availability Monitor Tool (Watch It!): Monitor and alert on the availability of critical network devices.

You can use any or all these eleven tools to take your network monitoring to the next level. Learn more.