Best Practices for Network Monitoring

What is network monitoring?

Network monitoring is a proactive activity carried out by network administrators to ensure that the networks are working optimally by monitoring faults, performance and efficiency of networks. Network monitoring systems include hardware and software tools that are used to monitor aspects of networks like the bandwidth, traffic, uptime as well to check the performance of network devices like firewalls, switches and routers. Network monitoring is important because it can proactively identify faults in networks and prevent network failures and downtimes.

Benefits of network monitoring

There are several key benefits of practicing network monitoring and following the best practices. Some of the main advantages of network monitoring are:

• Network administrators can have a clear picture of the networks and their performance
• Analysis of network components over time helps to identify the needs for upgrades and implementation of new infrasturcture 
• Organizations can understand the normal performnace of their networks and can easily notice any threats in case of any abnormal changes in the behavior of networks
• Helps for better use of organizational IT resources and budgets

Best practices of network monitoring

Ensure the monitoring of essentials

Network device faults can drastically affect the performance of a network. Therefore network devices needs to be well monitored to ensure that they are performing as expected. We need to ensure that all essential devices are monitored based on the criticality of each device. Network devices are categorized as critical and non-critical devices and performance metrics for each device is decided for monitoring. Critical devices need frequent monitoring whereas non-critical devices donot require frequent monitoring.

Devices for monitoring can be catergorized as critical and non-critical dveices(Source:manageengine.com)

Selecting the right protocol

Choosing a secure network management protocol is another good practice in network monitoring to optimize the performance of devices. Simple network management protocol(SNMP) and Internet message control point(IMCP) are 2 commonly used protocols in network monitoring. SNMP is widely used for exchanging and extracting information shared between network devices like routers, switches, WLAN controllers. IMCP is basically used for exchange of information between servers and for error reporting in devices like routers.

Use optimal monitoring interval

Determining the suitable time interval/frequency at which the performance metrics for networks are to be checked is important to ensure that the critical devices are under proper monitoring. The interval depends on the criticality of the device/component and having minimum optimum intervals will help to avoid unnecessary load on monitoring tools.

Ex: CPU usage can be assigned a interval of 5 minutes while disk utilization can be assigned a 15 minute interval.

Knowing the threshold values

As a network administrator it is important to have a good understanding of the normal behavior of the network to recognize any changes from the normal network behaviour. Knowing these baseline behaviours help to set different alerts and notifications which minimizes the possibility of downtimes.

Reporting on each network layer

Networks consist of 07 layers according to the OSI architeture and failures can occure in any of those layers. In network monitoring the best practice is to use tools to monitor all layers and detect problems on each layer. Many network monitoring tools facilitates monitoring of these layers by tracking issues related to application delivery failures, routing, bandwidth usage, hardware failures etc.

Implement proper failover options

Implementing a monitoring stratergy with plans on ensuring high availability is important to prevent any loss of collected data in monitoring due to unexpected failures. Sometimes network slowdowns or failures may result in loss or inaccessibility in monitored data for analysis. Having strong failover plans will avoid this issue.

Follow the escalation matrix

An escalation matrix defines who should be notified on management level for diffenrt types of issues encountered in an organization. Network problems occure when right person is not notified or the responsible people ignore the alerts. Therfore it is essential to establish and follow the escalation matrix specially when there are multiple adiministrators or if the person responsible is not available in any network related issue. 

Monitoring network has become an important aspect of managing any IT infrastructure. Network monitoring helps organizations to experience uninterupted functionalities in terms of networks. With the advancement of technology more sophisticated systems and tools are available for monitoring networks. Understanding about best practices on monitoring organization's network components would add aditional advantages on using these tools to secure the assets of the organization.

References:

[1]https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/automation/what-is-network-monitoring.html

[2]https://www.manageengine.com/network-monitoring/basics-of-network-monitoring.html

[3]https://www.tek-tools.com/network/network-monitoring-guide-and-tools