Network Availability Monitoring

Network availability is typically checked and monitored using software. Network availability monitoring software is intended to detect, isolate, and assist in the remediation of performance-related issues in a network.

Network availability tools are built to scan devices regularly for key performance metrics. Network endpoints can be monitored in several ways, but many network availability monitoring tools use simple network management protocol (SNMP) to discover the devices on your network and map connections between endpoints, which can provide critical visibility into device dependencies potentially causing issues. These tools can allow you to proactively gather monitoring data from your network infrastructure with greater speed and accuracy than can be accomplished manually, which is critical to ensuring optimal performance and system uptime.

Network availability is a relatively simple calculation: system uptime (or duration the system was fully operational) divided by the entire duration of a specified time frame.

However, determining total system uptime requires monitoring vital systems and business-critical devices for bottlenecks, signs of wear, and other performance issues that could interrupt access to the network.

Using network availability monitoring tools can help you collect performance data in real time from devices across the network, which can allow you to know the moment anything seems irregular and quickly act to ensure uptime for your network.

Monitoring network availability metrics for signs of performance issues within your network infrastructure is a foundational part of ensuring a reliable, available system and business operations.

Network availability monitoring can help you better understand performance data from each of your network devices and system-wide metrics like bandwidth utilization, uptime, and overall availability.

Using network availability software to perform monitoring can provide you with an easier way to collect metrics from devices, analyze that data, and generate reports to demonstrate meaningful patterns or potentially correlated events. These monitoring tools are essential for having a better understanding of the health and availability of your network infrastructure on both a granular and high level.

These tools can also alert on network usage and performance that may indicate signs of failing systems or outages, including when device performance reaches pre-configured thresholds or other contingencies. By monitoring network infrastructure and devices for signs of anomalous behavior or performance issues, including whether devices have gone offline, disk utilization is high, or if one device is throttling network traffic in unanticipated ways, you’ll be able to troubleshoot and maintain your systems more proactively.

Network availability monitoring is a critical element of a network management strategy and can help dramatically increase the efficiency and effectiveness of your team and the success and longevity of any company or organization.

Taking a proactive approach to network availability monitoring can lead to significant cost savings by allowing you to anticipate problems and resolve them before they affect end users. Availability monitoring can help keep expensive downtime to a minimum, help you better ensure the infrastructure your company relies on stays operational, and can be important for requirements often included in service level agreements (SLAs).

SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) includes robust network availability monitoring tools built to help you troubleshoot tricky intermittent availability issues and identify root causes faster. NPM can help you more easily detect issues, automatically send notifications, and generate network availability reports to help you act on network availability issues before they affect users.

NPM is built to help you minimize your time to resolution. By monitoring critical network infrastructure and devices, NPM can help you more quickly see which devices are performing outside their ideal performance ranges.

By continuously monitoring, NPM can also collect detailed information about your network infrastructure and availability, which can then be used to help you track longer-term performance trends or recurring issues. Diagnosing a network availability issue can be difficult, especially during periods of peak network usage, but the historical data in NPM can help provide context into how current issues fit into a big-picture perspective of overall network health.

As an all-in-one monitoring tool, NPM is designed by working IT professionals to help streamline and improve processes. In addition to robust monitoring, alerting, and reporting functions, the tool includes intelligent network mapping built to automatically detect and add devices as they connect to your network using out-of-the-box monitoring templates designed to bring the most critical metrics for each device directly into your dashboards. NPM also features multi-vendor support for Microsoft Azure and Cisco devices, allowing you to more easily monitor site-to-site connections and VPNs. SolarWinds NPM software is also built to scale seamlessly as your department grows, allowing you to monitor up to 1 million elements per instance.