Everything about Network Monitoring

Network Monitoring Defined

Network monitoring is a process that ensures the effective performance and operation of network resources by detecting and analyzing traffic and other attributes to detect performance issues, potential intrusion, or component failure and the quality of services operating on that network. Monitoring provides early warning of possible interruptions to service and network traffic trends that could be addressed before the interruption occurs and calls attention to error conditions that can be corrected before impact is felt. Network monitoring provides historical, and background information that helps network administrators understand how their network performs under optimal conditions.

The most common forms of network monitoring include:

• Performance and Usage (including throughput speed and latency detection)

• Device availability

• Configuration

• Packet loss, transmission retries, and connectivity

Network monitoring typically focuses on circuits, routers, firewalls, and wi-fi devices, looking at critical component errors and performance bottlenecks that occur during normal operations but should be expanded to include all appliances and endpoints connected to the network. This provides a holistic view that ensures performance issues don't originate within a specific endpoint, growing the practice from reactive to proactive management. 

Networking monitoring should also include monitoring network devices for compliance with configuration standards and alerting technicians if a device does not meet expected standards or if the configuration changes. Many organizations use these alerts to detect unauthorized devices or unauthorized changes made to their network. It can also be used to ensure device compliance and support audits that look at the organization's security management practices.

Network monitoring commonly applies to:

• Data center operations: Monitor all data center devices and networks and keep them operating optimally and address any alerts that occur within the data center, or devices connected to data center resources

• Cloud networks and virtual or containerized applications: Ensure applications running in cloud data centers are available and that sufficient bandwidth is available to drive optimal performance from the cloud data center to the end user's device

Importance of network monitoring:

Network failures and performance issues are among the highest-risk areas for business interruption as they can impact many services with a single point. A bad circuit or piece of network equipment can take down computer operations for the entire business or area. With network monitoring, technicians can get ahead of several issues and address them before they interrupt business operations:

• Cyber-attacks, including denial of service attacks and intrusion attempts

• Bottlenecks caused by a faulty device

• Increased bandwidth utilization by a device or application

Network monitoring tools can be tuned to respond to these conditions using rules and machine learning, providing the ability to avoid manual intervention for common errors and optimizing technician effectiveness. They help the organization:

• Identify issues anywhere on the network, whether the issue is device or network based

• Provide historical data that helps identify cyber-attacks or degradation in performance

• Optimize IT resources, reducing job stress and burnout

Of all the reasons to monitor, cyber-security is among the most critical as their occurrence continues to rise, impacting organizations of every type. Cyber-attacks frequently take place by attempting intrusion into network resources, and network monitoring tools can help prevent attacks from various kinds of sources:

• Denial of service attacks: When an external entity bombards a network segment or device with traffic, monitoring systems can detect the activity and block the device or segment

• Intrusion: An attempt to gain access to a network resource with repetitive attempts to log in can be detected and blocked

• Known vulnerabilities: Monitoring devices for non-compliance, combined with patch management, lowers the number of devices that can be compromised using known security vulnerabilities 

• New patterns of attack: Machine learning, when combined with network monitoring, can detect data exchange patterns that are new or different from patterns identified previously, indicating a potential breach

At a financial level, network monitoring protects revenue streams by increasing the performance and availability of computing resources but also automates numerous manual tasks, increasing job satisfaction and optimizing technical resources.

What should be monitored?

A modern approach to network monitoring goes beyond monitoring network topology and ensuring all network devices perform optimally. Current network monitoring views the entire computing environment holistically, looking at the network from a topological standpoint, but using additional strategies to ensure the climate operates well.

Views or approaches in modern network monitoring include:

Technical: Monitor the topology of the network, observing device health, performance, or application delays and track patterns of network behavior

Functional: Monitoring devices and applications to ensure they are performing as expected based on their historical profiles, indicating changes that might indicate an issue

Business Process or Service: All components needed to deliver a business service are monitored, indicating any changes or degradation in service of any component or the network performance between components that might indicate a service degradation

Availability: Monitoring the status of all network devices and endpoints and addressing failures that occur with automation or alerts

Configuration: Ensuring the overarching network and all endpoints are properly configured using device policies and flagging devices that need attention

Performance and Usage: Monitoring traffic of each network segment and each device on the network to ensure performance is within expected limits and identifying infrastructure that is no longer in use

This inclusive view allows small changes that impact performance to be identified more quickly. For example, a slight change in how an application communicates to a back-end database might cause increased network traffic and bottlenecks. By seeing the increase in traffic immediately, technicians can back out of the change or increase bandwidth after analyzing information provided by network monitoring. Without this level of monitoring, the shift in performance would go undetected until end-users began complaining, and troubleshooting efforts would begin. This could result in days to weeks of degraded performance before the culprit is found.

Modern network monitoring's holistic approach is far more proactive than older network monitoring practices, increasing the reliability and performance of IT resources.

Network monitoring best practices

The modern network monitoring approach is part of a set of best monitoring practices that includes all the methods mentioned.

Network devices can be monitored in many ways, and each condition that could impact a network needs to be monitored separately. At the device level, the following attributes or device health indicators should be included in the most basic network monitoring program:

• Device status, including device update and time between failures

• Interface errors

• CPU and memory utilization

• Network bandwidth consumed by the device

• Device speed for throughput

Network circuits and segments should also be monitored for:

• Throughput speed

• Bandwidth utilization

• Bottlenecks, slowdowns

• Errors

Growing beyond the basics is then needed to support the dynamic needs of today's computing landscape. The network constantly changes with virtualization, multiple cloud data centers, and the hybrid work environment. Add to that the danger of cyber-attack, and it's easy to see that a network monitoring program needs to be robust, flexible, and automated to be practical. Once a determination of what to monitor, a good foundation and routine activities are critical. There are several sets of actions to be taken:

• Lay the appropriate foundation

• Consolidate tools and consoles

• Understand how to consolidate data (control alert storms)

• Include configuration management

• Provide dashboards and reporting

Laying the foundation for network monitoring programs includes knowing what you have and how it operates:

• Discover and document the physical network and its topology, including all network gear and an asset inventory of devices or endpoints that might connect to it

• Monitoring the baseline of how devices perform and the level of network traffic between devices comes next, as this provides a baseline that can be used to detect anomalies

• Setting thresholds for abnormal behavior using the baseline

• Establishing a scanning frequency that enables effective monitoring without overwhelming the network (like one segment at a time)

Once this foundation is in place and thresholds have been established, the network monitoring tools should be automated to manage common errors and capacity concerns. For example, in a virtualized environment, high utilization might automatically make another virtual server available to an application, addressing the situation with no technician intervention or loss of productivity. To get to this level of automation, network and other infrastructure engineers will need to work together to review baseline information and determine the activities that can be automated, instrumenting these as policies with the network monitoring tools. 

Not only does this replication cause the potentialConsider a consolidated network management system that includes a comprehensive feature set. RMM or Remote Monitoring and Management tools provide a robust network monitoring system and can consolidate the environment by providing all the function monitoring tasks operational managers need. They can give or integrate results, providing a single management tool for:

• Vulnerability scanning results and remediation activities

• Device status and health

• Device baseline information and history

• Patch management activities

• Software distribution

• Network traffic

Intrusion detection for additional load on the network if scanning isn't tightly coordinated, but duplication of effort and siloed views of the data lower the overall effectiveness of a monitoring program. Using scalable tools with integration capabilities is better than many network management systems.

Alert storms can occur when critical devices encounter errors. For example, a single router problem can cause alerts to be generated by every device attached to them. This level of alerting can quickly overwhelm network monitoring systems and technicians if some form of consolidation isn't performed within the tool. Artificial intelligence can help understand common network traffic patterns and help with consolidation, but so can configuration management.

Configuration management is an essential aspect of network monitoring from several perspectives:

• Network configuration management provides a baseline of the network topology and can help consolidate alert storms into a single, effective alert by understanding connectivity relationships. Understanding the expected configuration also helps if an unidentified device attempts to connect to network resources or is placed on a network, adding a layer of security protection.

• Service configuration management provides a view into all components needed to operate a business or technical service successfully. This enables network monitoring systems to make sense of alerts by identifying the services impacted by an error and their business criticality. Service configuration management is also essential for security vulnerability management as it helps prioritize patch management activities.

• Device configuration management enables an organization to establish the acceptable configuration for devices by their class. For example, it would call out a Windows server operating system to be used, require patches and software levels, alert technicians, or automatically install missing patches or update the software version when an anomaly is detected. Similar capabilities ensure that all network gear is configured correctly and meets the organization's technical requirements.

Configuration management also lowers the risk of changes to the environment by assisting with a full assessment of how a change could impact service components or other services that use an application or endpoint.

Dashboard views provide a means of managing an extensive network from a single pane of glass. Aside from the expense of operating many network monitoring systems, consolidation and integration can provide a single dashboard for each group of technicians, enabling them to manage by exception quickly and efficiently. Dashboard views will vary by department and technician role and should be combined with reports to provide administrators with the data they need to operate their environments successfully.

Network Monitoring System Features

Network monitoring systems must support all the best practices to help organizations achieve modern network monitoring standards. At a high level, this includes the following for essential network monitoring:

• Discovery: ability to discover network devices and configuration as well as an inventory of devices that connect to the network

• Mapping: using the network device inventory and traffic patterns, tools should be able to map the topology of the network and service configuration

• Consoles: the ability to view performance summaries and drill down to the device level to dig deeper and perform troubleshooting

• Automated response and alerting based on history and manually configured thresholds

Appropriate network management takes additional capabilities needed to manage the configuration network gear and devices that connect to the network:

• Ability to set configuration policies and monitor configurations against these policies

• Automated remediation of devices not meeting standard configuration (or workflow that creates work orders and assists in the remediation where testing and approval are required)

• Integration with vulnerability management software or the ability to scan for known vulnerabilities and manage the installation of fixes

• Ability to detect abnormal traffic or activity patterns and alert technicians of the potential of cyber-attack

As with any software, network monitoring systems can be simple or robust. Network monitoring features may be part of a more robust management platform for large enterprises or MSPs. These platforms are often broken down as follows:

RMM Systems: Remote monitoring and management features include network monitoring, device and endpoint monitoring, patch management, and software distribution across various operating systems and enable control of infrastructure and end-user devices like workstations and mobile devices. These tools include asset discovery and configuration management capabilities, providing all the back-end capabilities needed for effective network monitoring.

PSA Systems: Adding Professional Services Automation to the toolset provides service desk ticketing, self-service, ingestion of emails to create tickets, and automated workflows for patch management and user request management. They enable technicians to fully view the end user's environment when troubleshooting issues.

As part of a larger platform designed to help manage the entire enterprise, these robust network monitoring systems provide consolidated dashboard views to all technicians, often customizable by the technician, and reports that assist with compliance and auditing. They are modern network monitoring tool that provides the holistic operational views needed to manage the entire enterprise across multiple data centers and technologies.

Getting Started With Network Monitoring

Organizations getting started with or expanding their network monitoring practice should begin by assessing the network monitoring and infrastructure management tools already in the environment and assessing the gaps. The initial improvement activity might include integrating these tools to provide a single reference point and centralized network management practices.

Existing automated responses and policies should also be documented. An updated inventory of these items will shorten the time needed to implement a more robust network monitoring system.

Gaps should be turned into requirements for determining the best network monitoring solution, and the overarching level of effort should be estimated. This will help the organization create a plan for implementing a robust network monitoring practice, including the base tools and integrations needed to create a single, consolidated console and approach.