Why You Want to Monitor Your Network

by May 26, 2020

Many moving parts make up a modern IT environment. The average computing environment is a complicated construction comprised of servers, workstations, applications, and databases. A common characteristic of these entities is that by themselves, they are usually not very useful. Their real value starts to become evident when they are connected in some way, allowing them to interoperate with each other and human users.

That’s where your network comes in. You can look at the network as the computing equivalent to your body’s circulatory system. Without it, you are just a bunch of disconnected organs that can’t do much of anything. But with it, the cooperation of a lot of diversified biological systems turns you into an intelligent and mobile creature that enjoys almost limitless possibilities.

Your network has a similar effect on your computing resources. A database that holds extremely important and valuable information is relatively useless if it is isolated in the middle of a data center with the only access possible by individuals physically interacting with it at close quarters. In this situation, the database cannot share its data resources with other systems or anyone not standing next to the server on which it is running. The addition of a network changes all of that and exponentially increases the utility of all connected components.

What Keeping Tabs on Your Network Can Show You

Taking the human circularity system analogy a step further, it is quite common for people to keep an eye on their health with tactics such as monitoring their blood pressure. Discovering elevated blood pressure levels can be the first sign of other problems lurking in the system. Identifying this issue allows it to be dealt with before it manifests itself in more serious problems like a stroke or heart attack. The benefits of monitoring this metric far outweigh any minor inconvenience associated with performing the tests.

Network monitoring affords the same kinds of advantages when considering the health of your IT environment. The practice of monitoring can be instrumental in finding underlying problems with the computing infrastructure so they can be dealt with before causing issues with your end-users.

There are multiple benefits that an organization can realize by monitoring its computer networks. Here are some of the more common and important reasons to implement monitoring on all of your computing networks.

Maintaining performance in a complex IT network is virtually impossible without having a viable monitoring system in place. Without a view of network performance, issues with slow system response can result in DBAs chasing down phantom database problems when the real culprit is packet loss or latency. Your team cannot effectively address individual parts of the computing landscape without monitoring its connectivity.

Security is a critical concern in all IT environments and network monitoring can play a crucial role in protecting your resources from uninvited guests. Monitoring can be used to identify unexpected usage spikes or unknown devices that have connected to your network which can be warning signs of an imminent cyber attack. It can also be used to verify that employees are steering clear of dangerous websites that may impact your systems.

Identifying usage trends in any area of your IT environment allows you to allocate resources in the most beneficial way to address the needs of your user community. It may be that you need to adjust network bandwidth to accommodate an influx of users to a new system offering. A network monitor makes it possible to fix bandwidth issues before they become problems, to keep your users happy.

Cost savings in IT are always welcomed by management throughout an enterprise. Monitoring your network can help you avoid unnecessary outages that negatively affect your bottom line. You can also discover network segments that are underused and may be candidates for consolidation or elimination, directly leading to financial savings.

You Need a Comprehensive Network Monitoring Tool

IDERA’s Uptime Infrastructure Monitor is just such a tool. It’s like a blood pressure monitor for your network that works 24/7/365 to give you information on the current state of the connectivity that keeps your infrastructure alive. It provides visibility across your entire network to keep you apprised of the health and performance of all its components. The tool alerts you to bottlenecks that are impacting performance and assists in finding and resolving the root cause of the problem before it impacts your end-users.

You can customize the alerts generated by Uptime Infrastructure Monitor so you are not bogged down with false warnings that just confuse the support staff. Locate users that are using inordinate amounts of bandwidth so you can shut them down or modify their usage habits. Don’t let a few rogue systems or users drag down the performance of your whole network.

With all the benefits provided by network monitoring, it’s a no-brainer that your IT environment should include it as part of its basic operational toolset. Let Uptime demonstrate where it got its name by helping you ensure that your systems stay up and are running smoothly to satisfy all user requirements.