The network ties systems together, and today it ties together more systems than ever before. The Internet of Things, mobile devices, and the cloud are all critical parts of corporate technology, and all depend on solid, reliable connectivity to function. Many of today’s connections use the public internet, which was never designed for the kind of reliable performance corporate applications require.

More Demand Makes Monitoring More Complex

Effective network monitoring is necessary for businesses to make sure they get the network performance they need, but all these demands on the network make monitoring complicated. There can be thousands of endpoints, thousands of applications, and terabytes of data. Workloads and instances spin up on demand. It’s hard to understand the overall structure of the network and the critical dependencies due to the sheer volume of usage and the constant changes.

Effective network monitoring requires understanding the network’s design and the application’s requirements to ensure appropriate metrics are gathered. Monitoring should capture both error and performance data. Typically devices are monitored to verify that their status is up, that they are not experiencing errors such as packet loss, and their performance matches expected levels.

Performing effective network monitoring also requires determining the baseline, normal network status in order to recognize when the metrics indicate a problem. Without the baseline, there may be too many false alerts, leading admins to fail to respond when an alert indicated a true problem. When first implementing network monitoring, it’s important to allocate time to collect this baseline data.

Despite the increase in network complexity and the increased importance of monitoring, the old standby tools still provide the information needed. Simple ping or telnet to verify connectivity, and SNMP to gather information from networked devices, continue to collect the network data needed to understand your status. The trick is collecting that data from the right places in the network, combining it with log files, displaying it meaningfully in dashboards, and responding appropriately to any issues reported.

Prescient Solutions network services help Chicago and Schaumburg area businesses design, implement, and support high-performance networks that meet business needs. Our IT consulting and managed services teams are certified in the network infrastructure technologies that provide the foundation of your connected, collaborative workspace. Effective use of monitoring technology ensures that problems are identified and addressed before users experience issues that impact productivity. Contact us to learn how Prescient Solutions can help you prevent network problems.