Think about all the essential business activities your network underpins and provides: communications, business and cloud services, transactions, data access, and much more. Failure to maintain your network’s health can lead to malfunctions that seriously disrupt these services. Proactive network monitoring is, therefore, essential, playing a crucial role in preventing these interferences.

It also creates several positive outcomes like cost savings and user satisfaction.

Let’s explore the value and importance of vigilant monitoring in more detail.

Greater network visibility

Understanding your network(s), its components, bottlenecks, and capacity is essential to effective network administration. Network monitoring provides a comprehensive view of your infrastructure and ecosystem. Thanks to greater visibility, you are better placed to drive performance and efficiency gains and defend against threats.

Proactive issue detection

A vital focus of network monitoring is to detect issues before they impact users. Proper monitoring identifies anomalies such as unusual traffic patterns or device failures, allowing you to address them promptly.

Better network security

Network monitoring helps identify and categorize security risks, such as unauthorized access attempts from outside your company, as well as suspicious activities from malicious actors within (a disgruntled employee, for example).

These red flags enable you to respond decisively to shut down dangers like data breaches. And avoid unhappy, costly consequences like lost records, falling revenues, reputational damage, and potential fines from regulators.

Optimal performance

Regular monitoring can raise the bar on your network’s performance. By analyzing and managing performance metrics, you can optimize bandwidth usage, prioritize traffic, and balance loads. These initiatives ensure that all network devices function efficiently and effectively, reducing operational costs.

Reduced downtime

Unplanned downtime costs organizations billions and will cost your business, too, if unprepared. The downtime toll starts mounting the minute you crash offline and can be substantial. Think: costly repairs, lost revenues, unhappy customers, and reputational harm. Effective network monitoring minimizes downtime by providing real-time alerts and reports on network problems and initiating remedial steps.

User satisfaction

A well-monitored network ensures that all users (including C-suite execs, employees, and customers) enjoy speedy, seamless, and efficient functionality with minimal disruption. This boosts productivity and creates better customer experiences. In fact, studies have shown that 90% of customers spend more after a good client experience.

Compliance

In sectors with strict regulatory requirements (finance, healthcare, education, legal), network monitoring helps ensure compliance. Logs, reports, and audits of network activities make it easier to demonstrate compliance and pinpoint non-compliance.

There are several categories of network monitoring, each addressing a specific aspect of the system. We’ll run through the main models.

Network performance monitoring

Traffic monitoring analyzes how data moves through a network. The goal is to identify trends and potential irregularities and create a more efficient flow.

It might track:

• Types of network traffic (e.g. video, VoIP, downloads)
• High-bandwidth-consuming users or applications
• Suspicious traffic patterns that might signal a cyber threat

This monitoring helps balance network load and prevent congestion while red-flagging potential security dangers like malicious software exfiltration and DoS attacks. It also improves Quality of Service (QoS) by prioritizing essential traffic. For example, real-time applications like video conferencing might receive higher priority than less time-sensitive emails.

Network performance monitoring

Performance monitoring tracks the overall health and efficiency of a network by measuring key performance metrics, such as:

• Bandwidth usage, throughput, uptime/downtime, and latency.
• Server response times: This includes on-premises servers and hosted servers.
• Round-trip time (RTT): The time it takes data to travel from source to destination and back again.
• Jitter: Uneven or unpredictable data flow in the same stream (which causes performance issues like dropped calls or frozen video).
• Packet loss, packet errors, packet discards: When data packets are corrupted, lost, or incorrectly formatted, it causes unsuccessful transmissions, retransmissions, and general delays in information flow.

Performance monitoring aims to highlight network bottlenecks and congestion. It also helps optimize bandwidth usage, enabling high-bandwidth applications without spoiling connectivity for other users.

Security monitoring

Security monitoring detects and responds to unauthorized access, cyber threats, and vulnerabilities within a network.

It monitors many activities, including:

• Suspicious IP addresses
• Unauthorized login attempts
• Unusual data transfers or traffic spikes
• Malware infections
• Firewall breaches
• Phishing activity

Security monitoring helps spot and prevent cyber dangers before they cause major damage.

Availability monitoring

Availability monitoring ensures that all network components (servers, routers, switches, applications) are operational and accessible at all times.

It typically monitors:

• Network uptime/downtime
• Server status and availability
• Network connections and device connectivity

It assists companies in keeping mission-critical systems online and reduces disruption by tackling problems early.

Application performance monitoring

Application performance monitoring (APM) observes how applications perform within a network and their impact on end-user experience.

It monitors factors like:

• Web application loading times
• Database query response times
• Software crashes and slowdowns

APM ensures critical applications (CRM, ERP, cloud services) run smoothly and allows faster troubleshooting of glitches to minimize app downtimes. 

Cloud networking monitoring

With businesses increasingly migrating to cloud infrastructure, this type of monitoring is part of the modern toolkit. It tracks network performance across cloud environments like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.

This includes the monitoring of:

• Cloud service uptime and latency
• Data transfers between cloud and on-premises networks

This proactive tracking mitigates cloud service slowdowns and assists companies in using these resources effectively to reduce costs.

Here are six best practices that a good network monitoring system should incorporate.

1. Have a plan: Develop a plan that guides your monitoring program. This should cover your monitoring tools, timelines, operating procedures, reporting, and responsible parties.
2. Practice multi-layered monitoring: Gain comprehensive visibility by paying attention to all network areas, including hardware, software, cloud, and VPNs.
3. Set clear benchmarks: Clearly define the metrics and values you want to measure. Establish baselines so that you can track how changes affect operations.
4. Use automation: Automated tools can perform diagnostic and security checks and predictive analysis (predicting future issues) much faster and at a greater scale than manual processes.
5. Regularly review and act on reporting: Since network monitoring is a continual process, it’s important to review reports regularly to stay on top of development and trends.
6. Implement network segmentation: Use network segmentation to isolate sensitive data and critical areas. This improves security and monitoring and simplifies management while maintaining overall network visibility.