Network Monitoring Software
Plan to give here a series of posts on Network Monitoring Software. Its just an open ended topic & please be warned that its just a blog, hence isn’t planned as such. Am letting it to develop for itself over the next few days. The target audience is anyone connected with maintaining a network - you can be a CIO, a System or Network Administrator, a Webmaster, a MSP offering clients network monitoring services etc. Remember we offer OpManager, a network monitoring software & this series of posts will draw heavily from it.
Without much further ado, let me get started by defining the terms involved. Network Monitoring & Network Monitoring Software can mean different things to different people. There is no concise definition for the term in general, lets check out definitions from the web.
The Wikipedia on ‘Network Monitoring’:
| Quote: |
| The term network monitoring describes the use of a system that constantly monitors a computer network for slow or failing systems and that notifies the network administrator in case of outages via email, pager or other alarms.
While an intrusion detection system monitors a network for threats from the outside, a network monitoring system monitors the network for problems due to overloaded and/or crashed servers, network connections or other devices. |
A bitpipe.com definition for ‘network monitoring software’:
| Quote: |
| Software that provides real-time view of individual user activity on a network. Provides administrators with the ability to view the content of user utilized applications. |
We will stick with the Wikipedia definition & concentrate on monitoring of network devices. Most of you folks reading this would have set up, configured & been running your networks for quite some time now. You would want a software solution to monitor & to take care of your networks 24×7 with as little human intervention as possible. Many of you might even be experienced in deploying network monitoring solutions which may or may not be solving all your needs & are looking for the ONE that would save you all the trouble.
Network monitoring software market is quite a mature one and you get a plethora of solutions at very varied price points. Selecting a network monitoring software of your choice has never been easier and given the wide choice thats available now, tougher too. A search in Google for network monitoring software would get you quite a number of solutions. But be cautioned that many aren’t what they claim to be. (will post a separate post on this topic soon)
From a bird’s eye view, a network monitoring software should do just this - monitor various devices in a network & send alerts by email, pager, SMS etc automatically whenever a faulty network condition is detected. But most network monitoring software available today do much more than that.
The coming posts will explore the different facets of network monitoring in more detail. Something tells me that its going to be a real long series…