Five Devastating Network Monitoring Mistakes You Need to Avoid

Solutions Review details five devastating network monitoring mistakes that your business must take steps to avoid making.

Monitoring your network performance is crucial, but when your enterprise has hundreds or thousands of devices and connections on its campus, it can be difficult to track your entire network performance. If you doesn’t take the proper steps to monitor your network performance, it could suffer a major performance incident that could have disastrous consequences for your business. That’s why it’s crucial to know about common mistakes that companies make regarding network performance monitoring and how to avoid making them yourself. Below, we’ve listed five network monitoring mistakes that your team must take steps to avoid.

Be sure to also consult our Network Monitoring Buyer’s Guide for information on the top network performance monitoring and management solutions and vendors. It’s the perfect resource if you don’t want your company to fall victim to any of these network monitoring mistakes.

Not monitoring applications

In the modern business network, applications typically take up a large amount of network resources. Thus, keeping an eye on them as well as the devices on your network is critical for getting the full picture of your network performance. Many network monitoring vendors either offer a unified network and application monitoring suite or separate application performance monitoring solution to handle this use case.

Ignoring user experience

Monitoring network performance has traditionally been done from the device perspective, but today, user experience is quickly becoming more important. User satisfaction is a worthwhile indicator of network performance, as users in specific roles often require a certain amount of network resources to perform critical business operations. Many modern monitoring solutions come equipped with end-user experience monitoring (EUEM) capabilities built in.

Not looking at network device logs

Network devices generate logs that contain valuable information for network management teams. If your enterprise isn’t collecting or checking these logs, it’s ignoring valuable insights into how its network and devices are operating. Most network monitoring solutions have the ability to examine network events logs, helping administrators to troubleshoot device issues, examine historical security and performance events, and track user activity.

Sticking with a reactive performance monitoring approach

The traditional network monitoring strategy involved reacting performance and security problems as they occurred. However, your enterprise needs to be proactively searching for events and threats by continuously monitoring for suspicious behavior on a network. That way, your enterprise can discover potential threats before they happen, allowing them to snuff them out before they become a problem.

Not accounting for network growth

Your business is constantly expanding, adding new technologies and services — most of which rely on your network to function. As such, your network management plan needs to anticipate changes and additions to your network before they happen. A monitoring strategy should account fo scalability by projecting how much a network is expected to grow in the future; this way, your network team can have plans in place for inevitable expansions.

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.

Check us out on Twitter for the latest in Network Monitoring news and developments!