How to Streamline Your Network Monitoring Process

IT experts monitor your network’s legacy systems and policies. These professionals deal with its upkeep and make sure that it doesn’t cause any interruption that may affect business operations. You can keep your network healthy through different solutions that are available in the marketplace. Third party, enterprise level, open source, or freeware solutions offers insights into your system’s behaviour.

But just like any solution, the installation of a tool doesn’t guarantee that you’re using it in the best possible way. Fortunately, you can maximize the efficiency of the network monitoring solution and streamline its execution.

5 Things To Ensure Correct And Successful Implementation of Your Network Monitoring Product

1. Assess The Network Performance Levels

If you want to know how you prefer your network to operate, you should determine the network performance levels first. It’s crucial to define what you consider as normal for your network. You have to know what you believe is the infrastructure’s acceptable working condition before you implement a software that will monitor your network. This will help you determine the appropriate thresholds for your network. You can perform network tests on several components such as firewalls, routers, and switches, to name a few.

 

 

2. Conduct Network Device Discovery

You need to know what your network contains if you wish to monitor it effectively. Identify what devices you have in your network and where they’re located. You can use a software that maps your network so you can arrange the devices and create relevant connections. Network mapping is important in understanding your network’s health. It offers you a visual inventory of the devices within your infrastructure and how they’re doing.

3. Identify What Information To Monitor

The majority of network monitoring software depends on Simple Network Management Protocol or SNMP to take crucial information about a certain device. You can poll certain performance stats using an SNMP Management Information Base. By using a network monitoring software, you will be able to make custom probes that lets you boost your monitoring abilities by getting nonstandard information.

4. Allow SNMP and Flow Capture on Your Network Devices

SNMP is considered to be an effective way of getting network performance Columbia SC statistics from network devices. You have to configure the core infrastructure like firewalls, routers, and switches in order to support the SNMP. It will enable you to monitor the network effectively.

Before you configure the SNMP, check if the network monitoring product supports the different version of the protocol. Think of using the SNMPv3 to secure your network.

5. Determine Who Will Get The Alerts

After completing the four initial steps, the next thing you have to do is to set up the alerts and determine who will get the alerts in case a problem arises. You have to determine the internal altering policies by knowing who will get the notifications. Is it your network engineer, NOC, or IT admin? Then determine how the notification will be distributed. This would help you determine the next steps in possible troubleshooting process or escalation procedure according to the severity as well as service level agreements.

 

Call SpartanTec, Inc. now and let our team of IT experts help streamline your network monitoring process.

 

SpartanTec, Inc.
Myrtle Beach, SC 29577
(843) 420-9760
https://www.spartantec.com/

SpartanTec, Inc.
Columbia, SC 29201
(803) 408-7166
http://manageditservicescolumbia.com/

Serving: Myrtle Beach, North Myrtle Beach, Columbia, Wilmington, Fayetteville, Florence

Tips For Measuring Network Performance

 

These days, you need to have enough budget to make sure that your internet connectivity and other technology depending operations work seamlessly if you wish to run your enterprise effectively. As an increasing number of organizations continue to depend on SaaS and cloud applications to finish most of their tasks, it becomes crucial that they’re not only online 24/7 but that they can also offer their IT services reliably and effortlessly. These creates a much greater need for a company to measure their network performance periodically to make sure that:

1. They are getting their money’s worth.
2. Each component is working optimally
3. The rate of data flow between the network and users are consistently monitored.
4. Metrics are established to let them improve their user satisfaction.
5. Impending errors or bottlenecks that could result in network crisis are detected in advance.

 

 

What are the challenges that surrounds the measurement of network performance?

You have to know the different components and parameters that are included in a network before you can offer an assessment. Taking into account the complexity of a contemporary wireless network, choosing manual approaches, an indepth evaluation is nearly impossible and would be very cumbersome to process as well as finalize. As a result, trying to measure the network performance without using a specially made tools and processes, will consume the company’s productivity, and have financial losses for each minute of downtime.

The demands of networks grow daily and that’s why it’s important for measurements to be conducted correctly. The quantitative and qualitative aspects of a network has to be captured in every measurement process, so that all required data are made for use, in case there’s a network performance problem.

Common Network Performance Challenges

A common issue when trying to gauge the performance of a network was the insufficient real time provision that allows instant detection of issues in bandwith, servers, network paths, routing, and transmission. This mean that IT experts had to perform network measurement half blind up until they come across issues halfway. In most cases, the data obtained isn’t complete as packet loss or errors in latency may not be identified, therefore causing technical oversights that could result in IT crises over time.

Measuring Network Performance

Network Latency – used to measure the delays in the network, concentrating on the time spent in the successful packet transfer or a data packet from one point to another in a network. A network that has zero or almost zero latency is a network that’s working properly.

Things to consider when measuring network latency:

• Distance between points
• The quickest route between the ends
• Delays probably due to applications or hardware processing the transmission of data

Packet loss – number of packets that have been sent out successfully but never reached their destination.

Bandwidth and Throughput – Bandwidth is the number of data that could be transmitted between two points in a certain time period. Throughput is the number of data that was transmitted between two points in a given time period.

Jitter – its measurement could be detected while using the network for VoIP, by identifying the closeness of the VoIP video or audio to real life interaction.

What Affects Network Performance?

Applications – there are certain applications that are not streamlined to meet the network capacities or those that have slow performance could add unneeded stress on the bandwidth of the network and negatively affect the user experience.

Network and Infrastructure Issues

All switches, firewalls, and routers are included because they could in a certain way cause network performance issues.

Call SpartanTec, Inc. for information on how we can assist your business to manage and measure your network performance regardless of the size.

SpartanTec, Inc.
Columbia, SC 29201
(803) 408-7166
http://manageditservicescolumbia.com/

Serving: Myrtle Beach, North Myrtle Beach, Columbia, Wilmington, Fayetteville, Florence