How to Choose the Right Bandwidth-Monitoring Solution
If you work in the networking industry, you no doubt spend more time than you’d like putting out the proverbial fire and then wondering how it started.
Your network — however well-conceived or well-engineered — will, invariably, create problems for you and your team at some point. So for those of us in the business of preventing problems, it’s essential that we lean on our bandwidth-monitoring solution and put it to work for us.
Some of you may call on your monitoring solution every day, while some of you may use it on a more periodic schedule. But as networking professionals, we can likely agree that monitoring your company’s bandwidth is vital to managing both the LANs and WANs that sustain mission-critical operations and drive company-wide productivity.
The merits of monitoring bandwidth are, of course, many, but it’s certainly useful for us to briefly re-visit them now as we begin to consider how to select the best monitoring solution for your operation.
Typically, bandwidth-monitoring solutions convey critical information on your company’s fluid network usage and network parameters such as memory and CPU utilization. The applications allow system administrators to view live performance readings and trends of leased lines, routers, firewalls, servers and various network devices. The real-time and historical data administrators gather from monitoring solutions helps them shore up network security, analyze usage patterns, debug configurations and perform comprehensive network audits.
Making the Decision - A Checklist:Your bandwidth-monitoring solution should:
- Provide easy installation and deployment and not require extra hardware
- Be easy-to-use and not require training classes
- Provide continuous monitoring of performance (not just availability).
- Provide rapid alert and response to performance problems
- Support the three common methods for network usage data acquisition (i.e., SNMP, Packet Sniffer and NetFlow)
- Be affordable
In the next two weeks I will post a mini-series that will look at the “Five reasons to get serious about bandwidth monitoring” and “Five Questions to Ask Yourself as You Consider Monitoring Solutions”. Stay tuned.