Four types of network monitoring

Network monitoring can take many forms, depending on what needs to be monitored. As network architectures become more software-centric and decentralized - from a hybrid and multi-cloud perspective, network teams may find it difficult to understand the various types of network monitoring methods and tools.

Let’s look at four types of network monitoring, along with the specific mechanisms and protocols that provide the right level of visibility your enterprise needs.

[[430671]]

Availability Monitoring

Availability monitoring is the easiest way for network teams to know if a device is functioning properly. Some availability monitoring tools go beyond just monitoring whether a device is fully online or offline. Specific interface status notifications and network device hardware checks often fall into this category.

Examples of common protocols for monitoring network availability include:

• Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP). ICMP ping is a simple verification test that shows if a device is reachable on the network.
• Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). SNMP monitors device and interface status.
• Event log (syslog). Syslog collection servers can trigger alerts when an uplink, interface, or route becomes unavailable.

Configuring monitoring

Configuration monitoring checks are important for those who manage traditional network components that use local configuration files. Automated tools that can compare similarly configured devices for inaccuracies are essential from a performance and IT security perspective.

These tools typically take the command-line output of a device configuration file and compare it to other files that perform similar tasks on the network. Network teams can investigate the differences between configurations to ensure that all network components are set up for the same operation.

The main functions of configuration monitoring include:

• Monitor network configuration changes and who made them in real time;
• Automatically roll back configurations when unauthorized changes occur;
• Configuration comparison between network devices to identify configuration errors.

Performance Monitoring

While there is some overlap between network availability monitoring and performance monitoring, there are distinct differences between the two.

Availability monitoring is more concerned with the operational status of the components that make up the network infrastructure, and performance monitoring is the same, but with a greater emphasis on the performance experience of the end user. Therefore, performance monitoring focuses more on network utilization, latency, and suboptimal path selection.

Examples of performance monitoring protocols include:

• SNMP. This sends alerts when interfaces, switch CPU, and memory are overutilized.
• Event log (syslog). Syslog triggers alerts when utilization reaches certain thresholds or when unexpected routing changes occur.
• Flow-based monitoring. This provides visibility into specific network flow conversations and the amount of bandwidth consumed by each flow.
• Packet capture analysis. This provides deep analysis of network conversations that often reveal underlying transport problems that cannot be identified by upper-layer monitoring tools.
• Streaming telemetry. This is the collection and analysis of real-time network health and performance data to quickly identify and resolve complex issues.

Cloud Infrastructure Monitoring

In many cases, enterprises can deploy the same types of network monitoring tools on their corporate networks for both private and public cloud instances. However, many cloud service providers offer their own suite of built-in network monitoring tools. While these cloud monitoring tools are often free, they often fail to integrate with other third-party tools that an enterprise is using.

Enterprises must weigh the pros and cons of managing multiple distributed network monitoring services versus spending more time and effort centralizing monitoring into a few tools. These tools may be more demanding to deploy, but they help provide comprehensive visibility across the enterprise network and cloud.

Improvements in Modern Network Monitoring

Several notable advances in network monitoring can help ease the management and support burden on ITOps staff. For example, many network architectures can be configured and managed entirely through a centralized cloud portal. In many cases, the central control plane comes pre-built with numerous network monitoring tools and alerting capabilities, which means that separate third-party tools are no longer necessary.

Other improvements that have become popular due to the COVID-19 pandemic are hardware or software agents that can be used to monitor network performance for home-based employees and micro-branch offices. These hardware and software-based tools enable ITOps staff to monitor network performance for remote users, no matter where they work.

Finally, using AI and machine learning in network monitoring tools can help eliminate many manual processes and speed up the identification and remediation of network-related issues. Whether performance or security related, AI has proven to be valuable in discovering problems, determining root causes, and in some cases, automatically remediating network incidents.