What is network monitoring software?
Network monitoring software is an application which consists of several features and tools which help us to detect, diagnose, and resolve network-related performance issues by scanning the network devices for fault and availability.
Network monitoring software was built so that they can integrate with various devices and services which include routers, servers, firewalls, switches, and even virtual machines.
How does a network monitoring software work?
Network monitoring software tends to check the health and activity of internal systems via the network by sending a signal known as ping, to various system ports. The system uses a wide variety of check intervals which can be explained as the time between two consecutive pings. This could vary from every single minute to every four hours.
A network monitoring software can be used to check all kinds of network protocols, particularly internet protocols. This can be explained with the help of an example like website monitoring software can check pages like HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, IMAP, SNMP, SMTP, POP3, DNS, SSH, SSL, TELNET, and TCP. So, in case of web servers, the network monitoring software may send an HTTP request to the webserver to determine its status. But, in case of an email server, the software may periodically send a text message through SMTP, which is retrieved by IMAP or POP3. This way it can emulate the path of the typical message and determine the health of the networks and servers it passes.
Functionalities of a networking monitoring software
The functionalities of a networking monitoring software include:
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Real-time performance monitoring: This software constantly observes a network and report on their performance issues. This software even delivers metrics on network performance in real-time.
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Intelligent alerts: The most important work of a network monitoring software is to alert the users of the problems in their networks. This software usually provides all the information including the location, severity of the problem and even prioritize more crucial problems.
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Network maps: The software can even draw a visual representation of what the network looks like as they have a picture of all the devices connected to a network. These network maps are used by the administrators to look at an abstraction of their networks, which is required by organizations with highly branched and complex networks. These maps contain all the visual information on nodes and devices which lets the developers check the performance issues at a glance.
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Automatic discovery of device: Network monitoring software include device discovery capabilities that allow the platform to monitor new nodes. Usually, the software will automatically discover devices as they’re added to the network. This saves developers from having to manually sweep for added devices.
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Issues diagnosis and root cause analysis: The network monitoring software provides diagnosis and root cause analysis on problems it discovers to ensure that users can properly address network performance issues. This saves a lot of time figuring out what the issue is manually and go straight to fixing the problem.
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Natural Scalability: Many organizations constantly expand or consolidate networks to match their organization’s growth and network devices are replaced constantly. The network monitoring software scales itself naturally alongside the network as it changes.
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Customizable Dashboard: The network monitoring software usually come equipped with customizable dashboards that display performance metrics and also allow users to determine what metrics they need to see and how they’re displayed. This reduces the time wasted searching for relevant information.
Network Monitoring Softwares available in the market
Out of the network monitoring software available in the market like Datadog network performance monitoring or Zabbix or Atera, Nagios is one of the top open-source network monitoring software. Nagios includes alert systems, community plugins, a dashboard view and much more.
We at Tetra provide implementation and customization services on Nagios. With a team having high expertise in Nagios, we are the right partner for Nagios deployment for your organization.
