Network monitoring software and solutions have been in existence for a long time now. Right from SNMP in the 1980s to the advanced technologies this year, network monitoring has seen significant progress. There are more comfortable to use protocols and better up-gradation.
They help network managers in various ways, but they are not something that they have always considered. There are so many reasons why one has to find a network monitoring software, and, in this article, you are going to see the top ten reasons.
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Device Discovery
The device discovery is the critical task that network monitoring takes care of with ease. The network monitoring discovers any dark corners present in your network or system with just one click. If there are extensive networks, it is not easy to understand what are the dark corners you have and which IP addresses are working.
But with network monitoring, you will be able to discover those hidden dark corners, which may affect your entire network. There is no such requirement or need for you to monitor the network daily. You can do it every week, and sometimes sudden monitoring is enough for you to discover any malicious network presence.
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Proper Mapping
Once the networking monitoring is done with discovery, you will be able to map out your network to its cabled and physical links directly. If you are running a Wi-Fi connection, then all the devices associated with your Wi-Fi will be scanned. From now onwards, you don’t have to follow the server racks or wonder about the hypervisor hosts either.
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Health Status of Devices
You can either do single or multiple monitoring to know the health status of devices. They will check a device and confirm whether it is offline or down, if either of these situations happens, then the same will reflect in maps.
They can also alert IT support teams about those particular networks. Usually, the network monitoring software uses ping or port techniques to know the health status of devices.
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Hardware Trends for a Long Time
There are so many parameters for the hardware devices. CPU utilization, port bandwidth statistics, hard-disk capacity, and memory usage, are some of those factors that network monitoring software will check. It builds the reports regarding each hardware item, and these reports can be used to estimate the performance of the devices for the foreseeable future. For example, if there is a report of a system that is consuming 5% of hard-disk capacity each day, it will reflect a trend following which the IT support team can take necessary precautions.
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Cloud Integration
The cloud storage has been an integral part of our life, and this is the reason why network monitoring is extending its support to cloud services too. From Amazon AWS to Microsoft Azure, the network monitoring system will take care of all the cloud services effectively. You will be able to track the usage of your cloud storage to estimate the costs that you are spending on it.
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Alerts to Support Team
Network monitoring is good at identifying the devices that are down or offline. But what to do next? Just identifying the damaged device isn’t going to help. It is essential to inform the IT support team about it, and network monitoring software does that too. If it finds any issue in the network, it immediately alerts the support team. There are so many ways to notify the team i.e. email, SMS, slack message, running scripts, raising a new ticket, or communicating with the virtual software.
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Traffic Analysis for Particular Network
It is always essential to know the traffic analysis of every network. Be it sflow or Netflow, the routers and switches will start sending packet data. This data will be sent to the network monitoring system for proper analysis. This analysis will not only check up on the health of a network monitoring system, but they will also reveal the port’s utilization. You will get to know who the top communicator is at a particular time. You can know everything about the traffic in-network with this monitoring service. It shows when the system is overburdened and by what it is overburdened too.
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Managing Network Devices
Network monitoring is a centralized feature which will help you in knowing the devices and the tasks that they are performing. For example, if you give access to network monitoring software to access configuration files present in a particular system, the network monitoring software will start backing it up and monitors the files for any changes. It will help in restoring the configuration files and issue commands to various networks. Network monitoring is a truly centralized option which will aid you in multiple ways.
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Checks Health of Applications
Most of this article has been focused on hardware issues, but network monitoring takes care of software issues too. If there is an issue with either software or hardware, the network monitoring solutions will take care of that without any hassle. It checks the health and performance of both software and application, ensuring that they are working correctly. If there is an issue with the performance of any software, it will be immediately reported to the IT support team.
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Analyze Wireless Connectivity
The world is becoming wireless, and it has become imperative to monitor these wireless networks with a lot of care. No matter what kind of issue or problems you are facing with a particular network system, the wireless connectivity feature will handle it effectively. You will be able to analyze the wireless connectivity with ease.
Moving Forward
In most of the cases, the IT teams can’t know what the issue is and where is it. The user has to report about it so that everyone can comprehend it. This scenario is the reason why it is always significant to have a network monitoring system in place that will take care of these kinds of issues with ease.
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