How does network monitoring work?

Network monitoring complements network management and works by collecting data from the various systems that make up an enterprise's computer network. For example, an enterprise may collect data from the routers, firewalls, load balancers, and endpoints in its environment.

This can be accomplished using the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), which is supported by most devices and can be used to collect a variety of different data. As part of a network monitoring program, an organization might collect information including bandwidth usage, CPU usage, interface errors/discards, IP time delay and hop count, throughput, and uptime.

All of this information provides hints about the health of the network. For example, CPU utilization and uptime hint at how well endpoints are working, while interface errors and discards indicate problems with the system. By collecting and analyzing this information, network teams can identify and correct problems before they have a significant impact on the business.

Benefits of Network Monitoring

Network monitoring enables businesses to gain better insight into how their network is working. This can provide a variety of benefits, including:

Network Visibility: Network monitoring gives enterprises greater insight into how the corporate network is being used and operating. This visibility can be used to identify devices on the network and detect network security and infrastructure issues that pose a risk to the business.

Improve efficiency: With the visibility provided by network monitoring, enterprises can determine how well their current infrastructure supports the business. Network traffic mapping and bandwidth utilization analysis can help determine how to reconfigure or upgrade the network infrastructure to improve efficiency.

Strategic Planning: IT teams have limited budgets and resources to spend on system updates and upgrades. Network monitoring can provide valuable insights into the changes needed to support an organization’s operations now and in the future.

Improved availability: Network monitoring enables businesses to detect and resolve issues before they pose a significant risk to the business. As a result, businesses experience less downtime due to overlooked network issues.

Improved productivity: Network monitoring can improve network performance, thereby improving the performance of applications that rely on and communicate over that network. This has a positive impact on the productivity of employees who use these applications to perform their duties.

Security Management: Cyber ​​attacks usually originate from the network, and their effects are visible in network traffic. Network monitoring can help enterprises identify and respond to cyber attacks faster, reducing their impact on the business.

Network Monitoring Use Cases

As long as an organization has a network infrastructure, the process of network monitoring can provide benefits to the organization. Some example areas where network monitoring tools and techniques can be applied include:

Data Centers: Enterprises can deploy network monitoring tools and capabilities within their data centers. This enables the detection of various events that could threaten the data center's ability to provide services, such as power outages or network capacity issues.

Cloud: Many enterprises are adopting multi-cloud infrastructures, where data flows between multiple cloud environments and enterprise data centers. Network monitoring can help optimize cloud network topology to improve performance and reduce cloud network costs.

Containerization: Containerization has its benefits, but it can reduce visibility into enterprise applications. Monitoring container network traffic can help ensure that data is flowing properly between the various parts of a containerized application.