5 Reasons You Need a Network Monitoring Solution

Modern enterprises are required to improve network performance to keep up with user demand. Even a slight hiccup can end up being detrimental to your success. Investing in the best network possible is important, and it needs to be protected. Network performance monitoring tools provide enterprises with the insight they need to maintain their network.

Continuous monitoring

Continuous network monitoring is essential for fighting against cyber attacks. Cybercriminals are more advanced than ever. Automated monitoring tools provide the intel you need. One of the many processes that make network monitoring so valuable is that it learns what normal user behavior is. Being able to recognize the difference between a cyber attack and normal behavior will allow your team to react proactively.

Continuous network monitoring could have prevented the Anthem medical data breach in 2015 by observing common user behavior. The attackers submitted database queries remotely to obtain PII records, which is obviously abnormal. The compromised database in this attack contained up to 80 million customer records. Preventing this massive attack was not difficult.

Root cause analysis

When you suffer an outage, finding the cause is crucial. It doesn’t make sense to search for this manually. Network monitoring tools include root cause analysis, allowing your team to figure out exactly what you need as quickly as possible.

Having automated root cause analysis makes network repair a much faster process. Users are told where the problem is and what caused it. Eliminating problems that affect users as they arise should be the priority in networking. Without this tool, a spike or downtime can take time away from your entire team.

Analytics

Analytics are the perfect way to optimize your network performance. For example, root cause analysis brings attention to network performance causes, and if there’s a trend you’ll know it.

Tracking network trends allow your team to make decisions in an informed and data-driven way. Also, this provides teams with a detailed history of network problems, leading to efficient decision making. The best way to improve any network environment is to know where consistent problems exist and who these problems impact. In addition, network related technological advancements will be easier than ever to implement.

Productive failure

Earlier this year, I spoke with Tammy Butow of Gremlin, a company that creates chaos in a company’s systems. The objective is to find the strengths and weaknesses of your system. One thing that stood out to me in my talk with Tammy, was the importance of monitoring in a failed experiment.

Monitoring gives you insight into a failure. It’s the insight you need to make an improvement. Sure, you can look at your systems in-depth, but why would you deny yourself extensive visibility?

Failure is unpredictable and inevitable. How you deal with it is what you can control. Thus, getting the proper intel is the best way to deal with any kind of failure.

Prepare for the future

More devices are becoming network based. This obviously increases the strain on network teams. IoT devices, for example, are changing the way enterprises think about networks. Multiple DDoS attacks have been due to increased and unsecure IoT devices.

IoT will change the way we think about networks, so having the proper solutions in place ahead of time will make the technological transformation easier. Network performance monitoring solutions are more important than ever with this large-scale change. These solutions allow you to automatically discover problems with your network. An IoT device susceptible to a security breach will behave differently and your team will be able to snuff it out with simple dashboards.