Organizations undertake network monitoring for a variety of reasons. Most important among them are to make sure optimal performance, detect security threats, facilitate troubleshooting, and inform capacity planning.
Performance:
When you have several devices on your network, small changes in the performance of one device can majorly impact the performance of others. These issues can fundamentally affect how efficient and productive your employees are. Slow networks can result in shared devices and folders being slow-moving to load, and employees might find centralized databases lag if there’s a problem with servers or storage devices.
Security:
One of the most critical parts of network administration is keeping your network and enterprise data secure. Unobserved breaches could rapidly spread through your systems, wreaking havoc on your network, and data leaks could cause major losses to your business in terms of both reputation and money. Monitoring can be vital in identifying security threats before they take over your entire network. Network monitoring tools can tell you if a device crashes or stops responding (which could be a sign of something like a DDoS attack). They can also tell you if a storage device is rapidly becoming full, which could indicate a malicious attack or problem with event logs.
Troubleshooting:
With a network monitor in place, if a problem comes up with one of your devices, users, or networks, you can quickly see where the problem is, and when it occurred. As a result, you’ll find you can troubleshoot the issue much faster. Using high-quality troubleshooting tools means your end-users will be less considerably affected, and fewer productivity losses will result.
Capacity Planning:
Monitoring your networks enables you to improve capacity planning, as you can track which devices are running low on space or are slowing down in operation. On many network monitors, you can set up alerts to tell you when a device is reaching capacity, and some will even give you capacity planning recommendations to ensure your network is always running at its best.
