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6 Essential Security Features for Network Monitoring Solutions

6 Essential Security Features for Network Monitoring Solutions

6 Essential Security Features for Network Monitoring Solutions

What are the essential security features that every network monitoring solution needs to have? Traditionally, network monitoring solutions focus strictly on examining the performance of a network and all connected devices. However, in order to unify security and performance monitoring for network professionals, an increasing number of network monitoring tools include security features.

As one of the largest causes of performance-related issues for networks is security threats (such as malware), network monitoring solutions must be prepared to deal with security-related performance events. The exact scope of a network monitoring tool’s security feature set depends on the vendor’s focus, but every solution should have at least some native security capabilities built-in. Below, we’ve listed six essential security features for network monitoring solutions!

If you’re looking for resources to help you evaluate network performance and security monitoring solutions, our free Network Monitoring Buyer’s Guide has you covered! It contains profiles on the top network monitoring providers in the market today, including descriptions of the tools they offer and noteworthy features of each. The guide also features 10 questions you should ask prospective vendors and yourself before buying a network monitoring solution. You can check out that guide here!

Download Link to Data Integration Buyers Guide

Real-time, intelligent event alerting

Security monitoring doesn’t work well if your company isn’t alerted to issues as soon as possible after they’re discovered. The more time between your monitoring tool finding a problem and the tool informing your enterprise of the problem, the more time you give that security threat to damage your network. However, this should also be augmented with intelligent alerting features so that your enterprise gains actionable insights on security events. Intelligent alerting capabilities include tiering alerts to prioritize major security events and delaying alerts that occur during off-hours to prevent them from getting lost.

End-to-end security visibility

We talk a lot about how important full visibility is for network monitoring solutions, and that holds true for network security as well. If your business isn’t able to monitor every aspect of its network — including every device and major metric — it can’t ensure the security of its business network. Network monitoring tools must provide end-to-end network visibility to safeguard against security threats.

Traffic monitoring

A network is centered around communicating data between nodes, and a monitoring solution must be able to examine all traffic that travels across a network. This is crucial in helping enterprises to proactively discover issues before they become a major security problem.

Our Network Monitoring Buyer’s Guide contains profiles on the top network performance monitoring vendors, as well as questions you should ask providers and yourself before buying.

Bandwidth usage monitoring

One of the telltale signs of a security attack (such as DDoS) is abnormal bandwidth usage. A network monitoring solution should come equipped with the capability to monitor how much bandwidth a device, application, or transaction is using at any given time. That way, it can alert your company when high spikes in network traffic occur.

Automated remediation

An increasing number of network monitoring solutions are implementing automated remediation for security threats that invade a network. They can automatically apply potential fixes to solve the issue without human intervention. This could potential save time for your business, since your enterprise won’t have to respond to every single issue that props up, letting them focus on more pressing security problems.

Centralized security monitoring

In order to be an effective security tool, your network monitoring solution must be centralized. Enterprise networks are typically sprawling, so businesses need to be able to examine their entire network from one location. The majority of network monitoring tools only need to be installed once to cover your whole system; this is crucial in maintaining full visibility of your network while being able to address security problems quickly.


Looking for a solution to help you improve your network performance? Our Network Monitoring Buyer’s Guide contains profiles on the top network performance monitor vendors, as well as questions you should ask providers and yourself before buying.

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Download Link to Data Integration Buyers Guide

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