SpartanTec, Inc. Columbia: Overview of Network Monitoring

Network monitoring reviews the health of a network’s hardware and software layers. Network monitoring is used by engineers to detect and prevent network failures and outages and watch for suspicious activity.

What is Network Monitoring?

Networks allow information to be transferred between two or more systems. This includes between two applications or computers. Open Systems Interconnection (OSI), a model that breaks down many functions computer systems use to send and receive information.

Data must pass through the OSI to send information across a network to the end user. It will use different protocols starting at the physical layer and ending with the application layer. Network monitoring gives engineers visibility into all components of a network and allows them to troubleshoot any issues that may occur at any layer.

Hardware To Monitor Network

Companies that manage on-premises workloads and datacenters must ensure that the physical hardware that transports network traffic is operational and healthy. This usually includes the physical, datalink and network layers of the OSI model.

Companies monitor components that transmit data using this device-centric monitoring approach. This includes network cabling and network devices like routers, switches and firewalls. Network devices can have multiple interfaces connecting them to other devices. Failures at any one interface could result in network downtime.

Benefits of Network Monitoring

Major business disruptions can be caused by network failures. In complex networks with distributed networks, it is crucial to have full visibility to identify and fix issues. Managed IT service providers such as SpartanTec, Inc. in Columbia SC can help. If cross-regional queries are not answered, it is possible for a connectivity problem in one area or availability zone to have an enormous impact on the entire service.

Monitoring network devices have the common benefit of helping to prevent or minimize business-impacting outages. Monitoring tools for network devices can collect information periodically to verify that they are functioning as expected and alert you if they are not.

Network engineers can quickly respond to any issue that may arise, such as high saturation at a particular interface. This will prevent outages or other user-facing impacts. If monitoring shows that one server is not sufficient to handle the request volume, then teams can implement load balancers to distribute traffic among multiple servers.

Network monitoring and IT support can also help companies improve their application performance. Network packet loss could manifest as user-facing latency. Engineers can pinpoint the source of packet loss and fix it with network monitoring.

Companies can reduce their network traffic costs by monitoring network data and identifying inefficient cross-regional patterns. Engineers can use network monitoring to verify that their applications are able to reach DNS servers. Without this, websites won’t load properly for users.

Modern monitoring tools allow engineers to access the same data when troubleshooting and diagnosing network issues. The ability to consolidate monitoring data allows teams to easily determine if latency or other errors are caused by the network, code, host-level issues, or any other source.

Over the past few years cybercriminals have found ways to access the networks of businesses of every size. This may cause a data breach and your company money when they demand a ransom. Network monitoring looks for cyber attempts from the outside as well as the inside. monitoring can identify as threat before it becomes a problem.

Primary Use Cases of Network Monitoring

Datacenter Monitoring

Network engineers can use network monitors to gather real-time data from data centers. They can also set up alerts when problems occur, such as device failures, temperature spikes, network capacity issues or suspicious activity.

Cloud Network Monitoring

To ensure that applications dependencies communicate well, companies that host cloud services can use network monitoring tools. Network monitoring can be used by engineers to analyze how much traffic passes between regions and how different cloud providers handle it.

Network Monitoring for Containerized Applications

Network containers enable teams to package and distribute applications across multiple operating system platforms. Engineers often use Kubernetes container orchestration system to create scalable distributed applications.

Teams can use network monitoring to make sure that all components of their containerized apps communicate properly, regardless of whether they are running on-premises or cloud.

Network monitoring may be used by companies that adopt a hybrid approach to hosting their services. Some workloads are managed internally while others are outsourced and hosted in the cloud. This hybrid approach allows for some flexibility.

A network monitoring tool is useful in this situation to provide a holistic view of both on-premise network metrics and the health of data flows between them. When an organization is migrating to cloud computing, it’s common for them to use a hybrid approach. For small to medium size business, outsourcing network monitoring may be a better option. This will free up or eliminate IT staff.

Challenges of Monitoring Your Network

Modern networks transmit millions of packets per second and are extremely complex. Engineers use flow logs to examine traffic between two IP addresses. They can also manually log in via Secure Shell Access (SSH) to remote access equipment to run diagnostics.

These processes are not scalable, do not provide network health heuristics and may not be able to identify the root cause of network problems.

Network monitoring in Columbia SC can also be a challenge for engineers when companies shift to the cloud. Cloud workloads and the underlying infrastructure can cause network complexity to increase. Cloud instances that are short-lived may disappear due to changes in user demand.

The cloud provider can shift the network infrastructure. This means that network issues can often be out of the client’s control. Workloads may need to be moved to another available zone or region in order to avoid problems until they are resolved.