Five Tips to Streamline Your Network Monitoring

If you’re a network administrator, you already know that you’ve got quite a load on your plate. Keeping your network running smoothly is no simple task. While there are numerous tools on the market that can help keep your organization’s network in top shape, adhering to these best practices can help streamline your day-to-day NPM processes.Take a look!

Don’t Forget to Baseline!

An NPM baseline is a set of metrics essentially determines what ‘normal’ is. for the network. Baselining is highly important in NPM when it comes to establishing the thresholds for performance alerts. In order to set the right alerting levels, you’ll need to run some network baselining tests to understand where your standard networking conditions are.

Perform Network Device Inventory Management

If you’re going to manage your business’ network, it only makes sense that you’d want to know how many devices are on the network, right? Keep an inventory of all devices, ports, and interfaces being used for network connections. network hardware, servers, virtual machines, and any other SAN devices. By keeping a log of all network assets, you can easily track IT equipment for a used and unused device count.

Establish SNMP on all Network Devices

It’s absolutely critical for you to configure SNMP on all network devices if you’re looking to retrieve performance metrics using SNMP.  If you’re to enable SNMP on a router or network switch, you can telnet to the device in mind and add a read-only or read-write community string through the configuration mode. It’s also possible to allow SNMP traps to receive unsolicited trap notifications, or inform requests o  the status network device.

Establish Optimum Network Policies

All businesses need to have a well-defined network monitoring policy in place to allow or disallow network monitoring activities in regards to organizational compliance. Your network admin team should think about outlining the scope of network monitor activity to define all devices being monitored, who should have access to network data, and the purpose of collecting network data.

Look to the Future!

Your network is like a living breathing thing. As it grows, you need to ensure that your IT department scales along side it. Before deploying your network monitoring tool, yo should consider establishing a network growth forecast analysis to leave some license room for more devices and network interfaces. Make sure that you choose a network performance monitoring solution that is able to perform capacity planning so that network teams can receive alerts about projected capacity exhaustion for key network metrics.