What Is Network Monitoring?

• Network Monitoring Definition

  Network Monitoring Definition

  Network monitoring is a critical IT process to discover, map, and monitor computer networks and network components, including routers, switches, servers, firewalls, and more. It helps network administrators determine network performance and optimize network efficiency in real time.
• Monitoring different types of networks and devices

  Monitoring different types of networks and devices

  Faulty networks and devices can hamper your network's performance. Early detection of network issues can help prevent network outages, downtime, and more. Organizations need to effectively monitor their network to help identify, locate, and resolve issues quickly.

  A crucial part of the monitoring process is identifying and monitoring network-connected devices, their performance, and metrics. Devices such as routers, switches, and servers are involved in business-critical tasks and require regular and detailed monitoring. Network monitoring software can monitor network-connected devices, gather network performance metrics, speed up the troubleshooting process, and reduce downtime with multi-vendor network monitoring. It can also measure the health of the logical network, provide accurate metrics or information about each device in a network, simplifying the management of complex network devices.

  Network functionality

  It’s crucial to understand a network’s functionality. The job of a network is to exchange information between two systems, computers, and applications. The Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) Model simplifies the information exchange over a network by breaking several functions a system relies on to send and receive data. Data transferred over a network passes through each component of OSI, using different network protocols. Network monitoring provides visibility into each layer of OSI, helping network administrators easily identify and troubleshoot network issues.

  Common Network Devices to Monitor

  • Routers: Routers help connect networks via the internet.
  • Switches: Switches help connect devices such as servers, computers, printers, and more. Monitoring switches is critical to ensure network health and performance. It’s also essential to monitor traffic and hardware through the switch.
  • Firewalls: The role of a firewall is to protect the network by controlling incoming and outgoing traffic.
  • Servers: Server monitoring helps provide information about the network, data usage, and more.
• Types of network monitoring metrics and protocols

  Types of network monitoring metrics and protocols

  To measure network performance, it’s important to understand and measure several network performance metrics. Using network performance monitoring tools, you can gain insights into metrics such as jitter, latency, packet loss, and more. These network performance metrics establish a baseline based on which you can accumulate results and improve the network's overall performance.

  • Latency: Latency can be defined as the round-trip time the data packets take to reach its destination across a network. The odd spikes represent major performance issues that may happen and go unnoticed.
  • Jitter: Jitter can be defined as the variation in delay or disruption when data packets travel across the organization's network. Real-time applications for video conferencing, faulty cables, and network congestion can cause jitter, affecting all the network traffic.
  • Packet loss: While monitoring the network, packet loss refers to the number of data packets lost while in transmission over a network. Measuring packet loss helps you determine the number of packets dropped to help ensure data security and network performance.
  • Throughput: Throughput is the amount of data passing through a network from one place to another in a given amount of time. It’s a crucial metric to measure network performance.
  • Packet Duplication: Packet duplication refers to the duplication of packets while they’re moving in a network. Packet duplication is identified when the same packet is sent twice at its destination from source.
  • Packet Reordering: Packet reordering is a network metric that determines the number of packets received in a wrong order. There can be several reasons for packet reordering, such as multi-path routing, and route fluttering.
• Types of network protocols

  Types of network protocols

  • Transmission Control Protocol: TCP is a standard communication protocol used to communicate over the network. It enables applications and communication devices to exchange information easily. It divides messages into a series of packets for easier transmission.
  • File Transfer Protocol (FTP): FTP is a standard communication protocol used to exchange files and documents from server to client via a computer network. Types of files can include text files, documents, program files, and more. This protocol is built on a client-server model architecture.
  • User Datagram Protocol (UDP): UDP is a communication protocol similar to TCP. It simplifies the way applications, services, and systems exchange information. It can be used as an alternative for TCP and can be used with IP as UDP/IP.
  • Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP): SNMP is a networking protocol used to monitor and manage network-connected devices and applications, majorly in IP networks. It allows administrators to manage networks with the help of the internet remotely.
  • Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP): SMTP is a set of communication guidelines or a protocol using which organizations can send electronic mail over their network via the internet.
  • Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP): HTTP is a communication protocol designed to establish connections between servers by transferring a hypertext. HTTP protocol uses HTML tags to create links between servers.
  • Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS): This protocol is designed to secure communications among servers or computers. It can also be used to transfer data from the client browser to a web server using HTTP text or image. The data transmitted is encrypted.
  • Internet Protocol (IP): IP protocol is designed to assign unique IP addresses. It’s commonly used with TCP. The unique IP addresses of data packets help them reach the correct destination via different nodes in a network.
• Main benefits of network monitoring

  Main benefits of network monitoring

  • Stay ahead of outages: Manual errors, configuration issues, and environmental factors can contribute to network issues. Implementing network monitoring can provide the visibility you need to stay ahead of potential problems. It enables you to track and monitor live network performance data in an easy-to-read interface.
  • Fix issues faster: Monitoring your network can help reduce the occurrence of outages. Whether it’s a configuration error or network traffic-related issues, it can help you quickly identify errors and performance outages through live network maps and performance metrics.
  • Reduce complexity: With technology innovation and the rise in connected devices, modern enterprises rely heavily on the internet for several business-critical tasks. Internet-dependent services may include ISPs, service providers, CDNs, SaaS, VPN, and more. Each of these services operates over the internet, making the network susceptible to performance fluctuations, routing issues, and so on. Having proper visibility into your network early on can help reduce the chances of errors.
• Fault, performance, and availability monitoring

  Fault, performance, and availability monitoring

  Fault management/monitoring: Fault monitoring involves identifying, diagnosing, and evaluating errors. The role of network fault management is to maintain high network connectivity and ensure all the applications and services are running at an optimum level. This helps minimize downtime and fault tolerance.

  Network Performance Monitoring: Network performance monitoring is a set of processes used to determine how your network is performing and what problems are causing downtime. It lets you scan, discover, and map devices and applications to gain performance metrics such as latency, jitter, and throughput. This way, you can detect issues early on and improve your network health and performance.

  Network Availability Monitoring: In a business landscape, where IT operations are mandatory round the clock, the high availability of networks and services is crucial. Any downtime related to systems, applications, or networks can impact businesses' bottom line and lead to a huge revenue loss. This is when network availability monitoring becomes critical. Network availability monitoring monitors and tracks port, system, application, service, and IP SLA availability to help ensure the network is free from downtime and potential outages.
• Network monitoring tools features

  Network monitoring tools features

  Network monitoring tools offer five basic functions:

  Discover: to find devices on your network
  Map: to visualize your network
  Monitor: to keep an eye on your network
  Alert: to get notifications when devices go down
  Report: to deliver on SLAs with real-time reporting

  Monitoring solutions use standard protocols such as SNMP, IP, and TCP to poll network devices and servers and send updated real-time performance data. These solutions also provide multi-vendor network monitoring that scales and expands as your network grows. They offer network availability monitoring, critical path visualization, intelligent mapping features, performance analysis, and advanced alerting features.