Network Monitoring

If you are a network administrator or you are interested in monitoring what people are doing on the network, then welcome to the world of network monitoring. With the proliferation of network monitoring tools, you just cannot go wrong in keeping tabs on your network activities. In a network that requires monitoring intrusion threats from the outside, an intrusion detection system deployment is the recommended option. What if you simply want to monitor the status of your server, monitoring software will help you do that by sending what are called HTTP requests to keep tabs of the server environment. These status requests will either return a time-out or a successful ping. A network monitoring software has the advantage of measuring end to end response times accurately as well as alerting the user using various ways. An alarm may be sounded when a predefined limit is reached, when a certain condition is not met or when security is bleached. These alerts can even be configured to be sent via email to a remote user in real-time.

When it comes to network monitoring, the thin line between legal monitoring and privacy bleaching gets more and more vague. However, if you are managing a network, monitoring is one thing you want to be doing at any time. Network monitoring is like policing what is being accessed on the network and what network traffic is being transmitted across the network. This is something you want to be doing at any one time. Well-managed networks that have less downtime are ones that are regularly under surveillance. In a busy network environment, it can go a long way in determining the productivity of the team.

Network monitoring also allows one to take note of failing or slowing systems. Without networking surveillance, it can be difficult to determine bottlenecks in a network. Perhaps a server is failing due to too many requests, perhaps memory on a server is full or it could be infected by some form of malware. Other problems include overloaded systems, crashed servers and power outages. Some network monitoring software take virtual snapshots of a networks workflow. This allows for problem resolution even before a network failure occurs.

In the real world however, network monitoring does not have to be a complicated endeavor. It can be as simple as tracking the number of people logged in at any one time or the number of people using a certain resource on a network. When done right and with the right motive, then it can be a real time and money saver.