What Ought I Look From A Network Monitoring Product?
While every network is different, there are four areas that any best-of-the-best network monitor should be able to do:
1. Hardward and supply monitoring for all your technical concerns
2. Ability to monitor network software requirements
3. Monitor web traffic
4. IT services tracking within your companys network
Monitor PC hardware and supplies: Knowing when changes have been made to your network is a critical component of a network monitoring system. Is disk space low? Network managers need to know. Have disks been removed? Network managers need to know? Is toner running out? Network managers need to know. Have key devices lost their network connectivity? Network managers need to know or they can not respond in timely manners to concerns as they arise.
Software monitoring: Correctly monitoring software goes far beyond tracking what is taking place with technical equipment related to your network. Network monitoring done right also means:
Keeping track of installations
Noting which licenses are set to expire
Knowing which hotfixes (patches to fix specific bugs) are installed
Staying on top of the current state of all Windows services on each machine
Making sure all of your computers are protected with an up to date antivirus software
Ability to monitor Website traffic and volume: Networks only have a limited amount of bandwidth for all employees to share. When an employee requires a larger amount of network resources the result for everyone else is performance that has slowed down significantly. When network switches are overloaded in error the result can be extensive network slowdowns for everyone on that switch. Finding bottlenecks and uneven distributions for devices is yet another key advantage of effective network monitoring configurations.
Tracking technical services information: Network systems can also track items that are not considered physical objects like IT service contracts and when they expire. While such details can indeed help your organization save money it may not be the first thing you think of when considering the purchase of a network monitoring solution. Why? They alert you ahead of time when IT contracts are expiring which gives you ample time to find the best deals for new contracts.