What is network monitoring? | IBM

The primary benefit of network monitoring tools is straightforward and easy-to-understand visibility into an entire network’s connected devices and how data moves between them. Modern network performance monitoring systems provide baseline information that lets you automatically compare data and identify any network performance degradation. Seeing all this on a dashboard means your network administrators can quickly pinpoint issues anywhere within the network, identify the root cause, and determine who needs to fix it.

An NPM solution requires less time to fix network performance problems. Detecting an issue earlier means you can troubleshoot and fix it much faster, saving time and money. Network monitoring helps businesses optimize efficiency by catching and repairing problems before they impact operations and customers. That, in turn, reduces downtime, ensures employees always have access to the resources they need, and boosts the availability of APIs and webpages—so customers have access when they need it. Network performance monitoring also provides historical data and allows the troubleshooting of past network problems so you can avoid similar issues in the future.

Network monitoring solutions give you reliable and flexible management tools and capabilities, including pre-configured templates for specific vendors—such as Cisco, Juniper, Arista and Aruba, among others—to ensure all is working well. They help you comply with industry standards and government regulations. They can point out anomalies that may be early signs of a cyberattack. Monitoring tools can also help you track and benchmark your network’s performance metrics, which aids in goal-setting and improving network performance. All this helps you get ahead.

Modern network monitoring systems go a step further by supporting next-generation, software-defined networks deployed to run modern apps. Such new, modern networks require vastly different ways of collecting and analyzing performance data using APIs while also supporting existing methods such as SNMP. Supporting both new and existing networks helps network operations and engineering teams properly plan transitions to next-generation networks.

Network performance monitoring also lets you keep track of networks that are changing, growing and becoming more complex over time. With the rise of IoT devices, which allow networks to connect thousands of IoT devices or more, IT networks are becoming enormous and complex.

Reducing your IT team’s manual work through network monitoring automation enables them to spend their time on other business-critical projects and means you’re using your resources wisely.