The Essential Network Monitoring Books for Administrators and Engineers

Solutions Review compiles the most essential books on network monitoring that any network administrator or engineer needs to add to their reading list.

Observing your network for performance and security anomalies is essential for enterprises that rely on their business network to function. Network monitoring solutions track performance metrics across an entire network to ensure your systems are working properly. Books, whether hardcover or digital, are an excellent source for people looking to learn about a specific field of technology, and network monitoring is no exception. We’ve listed the top network performance monitoring books that you should add to your reading list. These books are intended for beginners and experts alike and are written by authors with proficiency and/or recognition in the field of network monitoring and management.

If you’re looking for even more resources on network monitoring, 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!

Applied Network Security Monitoring: Collection, Detection, and Analysis

by Chris Sanders and Jason Smith

“Applied Network Security Monitoring is the essential guide to becoming an NSM analyst from the ground up. […] Network security monitoring is based on the principle that prevention eventually fails. In the current threat landscape, no matter how much you try, motivated attackers will eventually find their way into your network. At that point, it is your ability to detect and respond to that intrusion that can be the difference between a small incident and a major disaster.”

The Art of Monitoring

by James Turnbull and Sid Orlando

“A hands-on and introductory guide to the art of modern application and infrastructure monitoring and metrics. We start small and then build on what you learn to scale out to multi-site, multi-tier applications. The book is written for both developers and sysadmins. We focus on building monitored and measurable applications. We also use tools that are designed to handle the challenges of managing Cloud, containerized and distributed applications and infrastructure.”

Effective Monitoring and Alerting: For Web Operations

by Slawek Ligus

“With this practical book, you’ll discover how to catch complications in your distributed system before they develop into costly problems. Based on his extensive experience in systems ops at large technology companies, author Slawek Ligus describes an effective data-driven approach for monitoring and alerting that enables you to maintain high availability and deliver a high quality of service.Learn methods for measuring state changes and data flow in your system, and set up alerts to help you recover quickly from problems when they do arise.”

The IT Manager’s Guide to Continuous Delivery: Delivering Software in Days

by Andrew Phillips, Michiel Sens, Adriaan de Jonge, and Mark van Holsteijn

“Turning good ideas into marketable software quickly is now a business imperative for every enterprise. Delivering software features faster and with high quality is the first critical step. The subsequent step is to rapidly collect feedback from users to guide the next set of ideas for further improvements. Critical software development objectives such as these set the stage for The IT Manager’s Guide to Continuous Delivery: Delivering Software in Days, Instead of Months.”

Network Monitoring and Analysis: A Protocol Approach to Troubleshooting

by Ed Wilson

“Ever wonder what’s actually happening inside your network? Why multi-tier applications suddenly slow down, print jobs fail, network elements suddenly disappear? The truth is in there – if you have the network monitoring and protocol analysis skills you need to unearth it! That’s where Ed Wilson’s Network Monitoring and Analysis comes in. It’s your complete, hands-on guide to monitoring and analyzing Windows NT-based networks-and using the information to maximize performance, plan for growth-even identify intruders!”

Network Monitoring Explained: Design and Application

by Dah Ming Chiu and Ram Sudama

“Network adminstration is a fast growing field, and users are facing a new age of computing based on networks and distributed systems. Network Monitoring Explained: Design and Application discusses the challenges of network monitoring, describing the various approaches that may be employed, and surveying the existing technology. The book will interest computer network administrators and managers, computer analysts (including performance analyists), network architects, and monitor designers.”

Network Performance Measurements: A Wavelet Analysis for Compression and Feature Extraction

by Konstantinos Kyriakopolous

“Monitored network data allows operators to gain valuable insight into the health and status of a network. Whilst such data is useful for real-time analysis, there is often a need to post-process historical network performance data. Storage of the monitored data then becomes a serious issue as network monitoring activities generate significant quantities of data. The work in this thesis is motivated by the need of measuring the performance of high-speed networks. Such networks produce large amounts of data over a long period of time, making the storage of this information practically inefficient.”

Network Security Monitoring: Basics for Beginners. A Practical Guide

by Robert Collins

“This book is a guide on network security monitoring. The author begins by explaining some of the basics of computer networking and the basic tools which can be used for monitoring a computer network. The process of capturing and analyzing packets of a network is discussed in detail. This is a good technique which can help network security experts identify anomalies or malicious attacks on the packets transmitted over a network. You are also guided on how to monitor the network traffic for the Heartbleed bug, which is very vulnerable to network attackers.”

The Practice of Network Security Monitoring: Understanding Incident Detection and Response

by Richard Bejtlich

“The most effective computer security strategies integrate network security monitoring (NSM): the collection and analysis of data to help you detect and respond to intrusions. In The Practice of Network Security Monitoring, Mandiant CSO Richard Bejtlich shows you how to use NSM to add a robust layer of protection around your networks—no prior experience required. To help you avoid costly and inflexible solutions, he teaches you how to deploy, build, and run an NSM operation using open source software and vendor-neutral tools.”

Recent Trends in Intrusion Detection System & Network Monitoring

by M. Sadiq Ali Khan and S. M. Aqil Burney

“In this book we proposed new multi-tier techniques including soft computing, stochastic, hardware implementation and statistical approaches to avoid and minimize the attacks which affect the performance of network model partially or completely. Our proposed method generates a less false positive rate that increase the detection efficiency by reducing the workload and that increase the overall performance of an IDS. The proposed Network Intrusion Detection System is capable of addressing many real issues in network security.”

Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems

by Niall Richard Murphy, Betsy Beyer, Chris Jones, and Jennifer Petoff

“In this collection of essays and articles, key members of Google’s Site Reliability Team explain how and why their commitment to the entire lifecycle has enabled the company to successfully build, deploy, monitor, and maintain some of the largest software systems in the world. You’ll learn the principles and practices that enable Google engineers to make systems more scalable, reliable, and efficient—lessons directly applicable to your organization.”

SNMP, SNMPv2, and RMON: Practical Network Management

by William Stallings

“SNMP is the most widely-deployed TCP/IP network management standard […] You will find clear explanations of such general network management fundamentals as performance monitoring and security control, as well as a specific introduction to SNMP network management concepts and information. Both SNMPv1 and SNMPv2 are described in depth. RMON2, the latest version of the Remote Network Monitoring management utility, is thoroughly documented, including practical techniques for its effective application.”

Zabbix 4 Network Monitoring

by Patrik Uytterhoeven

“Zabbix 4 Network Monitoring is the perfect starting point for monitoring the performance of your network devices and applications with Zabbix. Even if you’ve never used a monitoring solution before, this book will get you up and running quickly. You’ll learn to monitor more sophisticated operations with ease and soon feel in complete control of your network, ready to meet any challenges you might face […] By the end of this book, you will have learned more advanced techniques to fine-tune your system and make sure it is in a healthy state.”

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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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