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Why monitor your network?
Businesses rely on accurate network monitoring data because the network is the backbone of IT infrastructure. Lacking internal or external communication about your network can be disastrous, especially if you provide digital goods or services.
Network monitoring tools shouldn't be a "nice to have" that may or may not make this year's department budget. They are essential to monitoring performance, spotting anomalies, and identifying potential security issues. Monitoring empowers your engineers to catch complications before they develop into problems and helps preserve high availability.
Network monitoring tools also help build a faster, more reliable network. Once network traffic is characterized by baselining and collecting data, you can reasonably predict the effect of additional services or computers on the network, allowing the chance to build in low latency and keep to Quality of Service metrics for vital systems and applications. If you're not monitoring your network, you're not managing it.
What network monitoring tools are available?
Today's network monitoring tools are diverse, but you can generally group them into two groups:
- free, open-source solutions
- specialist turnkey solutions
In a Microsoft ecosystem, the SNMP application-layer protocol is already in place, and it can be enabled on network devices to collect and organize information. On the server side, you can use the Systems Centre Operations Manager to monitor networks and servers. Microsoft's Network Monitor is a free legacy tool for troubleshooting network problems.
The Linux ecosystem offers many network monitoring tools, such as Monitorix, Darkstat, Unload, and Netdisco.
Common open-source software used for monitoring includes Graphite, which can be configured to run on clients or use standard network protocols, and Nagios. SmokePing and MRTG are free network data tools, and WireShark is a popular, free packet analysis tool.
Your installed network equipment should also include manufacturer tools and software. For instance, WatchGuard's Firebox firewalls include network monitoring and analysis tools, Ubiquiti has the UISP network management system, and Palo Alto firewalls use the Application Command Center dashboard to provide intelligence about network traffic.
Some well-known specialist network monitoring solutions include PRTG and Solarwinds. PRTG is agentless software that monitors and classifies system conditions like bandwidth usage or uptime and collects statistics from various devices and applications. SolarWinds spins out the various moving parts of a network to monitor performance, traffic analysis, and configuration.
Graphite and Prometheus are free, open-source monitoring solutions with visualization capabilities for cloud-enabled infrastructure.
Graphite is an open-source time-series data monitoring tool with interactive dashboards and reporting capabilities. Time-series data is a sequence of numerical data points and information snapshots that can be stored and retrieved.
Graphite can render time-series data on demand and is a scalable monitoring tool designed to be deployed and run on inexpensive hardware. Graphite's integrated web app generates graphs from retrieved data and provides a user interface to help navigate various metrics and build user-defined dashboards. Graphite is ideal for cloud-enabled technology teams: Ops and DevOps engineers can use Graphite to monitor their applications and servers continuously.
Hosted Graphite, part of MetricFire, specializes in Graphite monitoring. Its product can be used with minimal configuration to gain in-depth insight into your IT environment. Although Graphite is open-source software, installing and maintaining it takes time and energy. Hosted Graphite can host your data for you, taking the cost and time-sink of installing and configuring storage equipment and servers off your hands.
How should I set up my network monitoring?
Network monitoring consists of real-time monitoring, alerting, and gathering data for trend analysis.
Some network monitoring solutions use agents—software installed on monitored devices that reports information. Agents can potentially access more detailed information and process it locally, reducing server burden. Although lightweight, some agents may also impact a device's performance. Other monitoring agents do away with agents, preferring to pull data centrally. Agentless solutions are easy to set up and maintain as no agent installation or management is required.
Before implementing a monitoring solution, you should establish a baseline reading of network traffic, which can be used to spot anomalies later on. Without a baseline, monitoring falls short because you have nothing to compare data. Knowing the baseline will also help with future upgrades and assessing the impact of additional strain on the network.
Your monitoring system should tell you when the network goes down and when it's back up again and inform you of network routing issues. Real-time alerts allow you to react quickly to problems, potentially saving your company money by avoiding downtime. You should consider setting up alerts based on unusual conditions - such as spikes or traffic drops - that might indicate a problem. These alerts can also be configured to specific parameters for your environment to reduce alert noise, and they can be targeted so that technical teams receive alerts applicable to them and their designated systems.
You can easily use historical network data from specific metrics to build statistics for management or customers and highlight behavioral anomalies that can indicate problems. Standard network performance metrics include packet loss, availability, connectivity, and throughput.
Good network monitoring tools should also include features that compare data and spot trends. These will alert you to potential network problems and help you get to the cause faster.
Data gathered from monitoring can also help spot anomalies in network traffic, acting as threat detection and troubleshooting.
Ideally, your network monitoring solution will allow you to monitor everything on one easy-to-read visual dashboard across all locations and vendors. With a single view, logging in to other platforms to monitor various issues is unnecessary, saving time.
Network monitoring helps with optimization: once you have a clearer picture of network utilization, you can eliminate redundant services to free up bandwidth for core functions.
Conclusion
Network monitoring is an essential part of network management. Using great network monitoring tools can save time and money by giving a heads-up on potential network outages and spotting possible security breaches before they happen. Your IT team can closely monitor performance with tailored alerts and pull complex data from network monitoring systems to identify capacity trends and assist with future upgrades.
When set up correctly, monitoring can help proactively discover underlying issues to prevent downtime incidents or even improve incident response times, dramatically improving outcomes for better performance and business profitability.
When choosing a solution to evaluate and eventually implement, you should consider budget, convenience, scope, and scalability. If you have been tied to a legacy vendor for too long, feel free to explore solutions in the cloud or from different vendors.
Numerous network monitoring solutions are available, from open-source configure-it-yourself software to tailored turnkey solutions that meet your environment's specific parameters, whether on-premise or in the cloud. MetricFire offers a hosted open-source solution, bringing the best of both worlds to the table.
MetricFire provides a Hosted version of Graphite that includes storing your data for two years, the Grafana data visualization tool, and much more. Minimal configuration is required to gain in-depth insight into your environment. You can easily book a demo or sign up for the free trial to learn more.
