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Today, more than ever, as IT environments become more diverse and complex, the need for an effective network monitoring solution has become paramount. However, with the digital environment, it’s constantly ever-evolving, so, these tools must keep pace with these changes to ensure they are still effective for users diagnosing issues and identifying bottlenecks within their network. However, constantly having to reconfigure and maintain the network monitoring infrastructure to meet these changes can be time-consuming and expensive. So, this is where Network Monitoring as a Service (NMaaS) comes in. Network monitoring can encompass various aspects of IT infrastructure including routers, switches, firewalls, and servers.
In order to aid your understanding of the term network monitoring, within this article what this term means and how it works. As well as explain what network monitoring as a service (NMaaS) is and some use cases of the solution, to determine if incorporating an NMaaS solution into your organization is the appropriate choice.
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What is Network Monitoring?
Network monitoring is the process of constantly observing and tracking the health, performance, and security of a computer network. It entails gathering and analyzing data from many network devices, such as routers, switches, firewalls, and servers, to guarantee the network functions optimally. The main goal of network monitoring is to ensure the efficient and reliable operation of a computer network.
What is Network Monitoring as a Service?
Network Monitoring as a Service (NMaaS) is a cloud-based service provided by third-party vendors, like Logit.io, to monitor and manage an organization's computer network. Instead of organizations deploying and maintaining network monitoring tools and infrastructure on their premises, they subscribe to NMaaS solutions to outsource the task to specialized service providers.
Utilizing a cloud based network monitoring (NMaaS) eliminates the need for organizations to invest in and maintain on-premises hardware for hosting monitoring tools. Also, cloud based network monitoring solution often provide scalability, enabling your organizations to easily scale up or down based on their monitoring needs. Finally, a cloud based network monitoring tool offers rapid deployment compared on-premises alternatives. This is because the infrastructure is already in place, and you can begin monitoring your networks shortly after subscribing to the service.
Network Monitoring: How it works
As discussed above, network monitoring is designed to enable users to collect and analyze data regarding network devices to ensure the network is performing as expected. To further aid your understanding of the topic and term, we have broken down network monitoring into a few key steps.
1. Data Collection: In the first step data is collected by network monitoring tools or agents. These tools can be hardware appliances or software applications that run on servers, routers, switches, and other network devices.
2. Performance Metrics: The monitoring tools will gather a range of performance metrics such as bandwidth usage, packet loss, latency network utilization, and device performance.
3. Availability Monitoring: The monitoring system checks the availability of network devices, applications, and services. It records their uptime and reports when they become unreachable or experience disruptions.
4. Security Monitoring: Network monitoring solutions will incorporate security features, such as intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDS/IPS), firewall monitoring, and analysis of network traffic for signs of potential security threats.
5. Traffic Analysis: As well as availability and security monitoring, these tools will gather and analyze network traffic to comprehend the types of data and applications being sent. This information is beneficial for optimizing network resources and identifying unusual traffic patterns.
6. Thresholds and Baselines: To aid your monitoring, network administrators will outline thresholds for each metric to establish acceptable ranges. When a metric exceeds or falls below these thresholds or deviates significantly from baseline behavior, it triggers an alert.
7. Alerts: Once the thresholds have been set the monitoring system will constantly compare the collected data against the defined thresholds. When an anomaly is detected or a threshold is breached, the monitoring system generates alerts. These alerts can be in the form of text messages, emails, or notifications to a centralized dashboard.
8. Analysis and Response: After receiving the alerts, IT teams will analyze the situation to work out the root cause of the problem. They then take appropriate actions to rectify the issue, like optimizing network resources, addressing hardware or software problems, or responding to security threats.
9. Historical Data: Finally, over time as more data is collected, these tools will be able to store historical data which will allow for trend analysis and capacity planning.
Network Monitoring vs Network Management
Network monitoring and network management can be viewed as similar and related concpets. The main objective of network monitoring is to monitor and collect data about the performance, health, and status of a network in real-time. Whereas network management is a broader term that encompasses a group of activities aimed at planning, deploying, securing, optimizing, and maintaining a network infrastructure. Network monitoring is regularly seen as a subset of network management. Monitoring supplies the real-time data and alerts required for effective management decisions. Management, on the other hand, entails broader responsibilities that go beyond immediate performance concerns.
Benefits of Network Monitoring
With the ever-increasing complexity of organizations networks, gaining a complete picture of your network is vital and a significant benefit as it helps to ensure you reduce the likelohood of disruptions. However, this isn't the only benefit of adopting a network monitoring solution. Another key benefit of network monitoring is capacity planning. By ensuring you track resource usage over time, network monitoring solutions allow your organization to plan for future growth and make eductaed decisions regarding expanding or upgrading your network infrastructure. Also, this helps in avoiding unexpected resource shortages.
Another key advantage of incorporating a network monitoring solution into your organization is histroical analysis. Network monitroing tools utilize both real-time and historical data, and it's this histroical data that is valuable for historical analysis, as it eenables administrators to analyze trends and patterns over time. This historical perspective is crucial for predicting future issues, making informed decisions, and implementing long-term improvements.
Finally, the last key benefit in our list of utilizing a network monitoring solution is compliance and reporting. Numerous organizations have specfic compliance requirements related to network security and performance. Network monitoring solutions include reporting features that can assist your organization in demonstrating compliance with regulatory standards.
Network Monitoring as a Service: Use Cases
For organizations wanting to guarantee the optimal performance, health, and security of their computer networks while leveraging cloud-based solutions, there is a wide range of use cases for a Network Monitoring as a Service solution. We have listed some of the most common use cases for this tool below.
Firstly, a common use case for a Network Monitoring as a Service solution and potentially the most obvious one is performance monitoring. The tool will continually check network performance metrics such as packet loss, bandwidth usage, latency, and network utilization. These metrics can be compared to define thresholds and if they fall or exceed this threshold you will be sent an alert so you can act quickly to rectify the issue. This is invaluable for identifying and addressing network bottlenecks and optimizing data transfer.
Another common use case for Network Monitoring as a Service is optimizing resource utilization. This is conducted by continually monitoring various network components and their resource consumption. For example, you could monitor the server performance by tracking metrics such as CPU, memory, memory, and disk usage in order to optimize resource allocation and guarantee that servers are neither overutilized nor underutilized, which may affect performance.
In addition to the previously mentioned use cases, another common use case of Network Monitoring as a Service is for uptime and availability monitoring. Organizations can utilise NMaaS to guarantee the availability and uptime of services, network devices, and applications. It creates alerts when network components go offline or experience disruptions, to ensure a quick response to these disruptions.
Our final use case for Network Monitoring as a Service is for cost optimization. By highlighting network inefficiencies and underused resources, Network Monitoring as a Service can help organizations reduce costs by optimizing resource allocation and reducing operational expenses.
If you’re interested in finding out more about our Network Monitoring as a Service (NMaaS) solution, you can read more here (link to NMaaS landing page) or reach out to one of our engineers via the live chat.
If you’ve enjoyed this article why not read The Best Cloud Monitoring Tools or The Best Infrastructure Monitoring Tools?