Choosing the Right Monitoring Solution

So, you've migrated to the cloud, or at least you're considering it, and now you want to employ a monitoring solution. Good decision.

After all, enterprise networks are getting more complex as globalization continues to rage – despite the recession. And outsourcing and the growth of wireless are expanding networks beyond their traditional reach. Consider, too, that IT departments are being asked to guarantee that applications and services run well across both private and public networks.

Beyond that, the rise and growth of virtualization and cloud computing makes the job of monitoring and troubleshooting all the components of a computing network even more of a challenge. Why? Because virtualization removes the hardware from the application and creates traffic more difficult to monitor and troubleshoot. And with cloud computing, apps are not housed on the existing enterprise infrastructure and instead reside over the public network. Because ownership of the issue is now shared between the IT staff and your cloud service provider, it makes it even more difficult to correctly identify and track down performance issues.

So the heat is on; and ratchets the pressure up a notch with CIOs demanding cost reduction and higher service levels. All in all, it means finding ways to work more efficiently and effectively. And the right network management tools will offer you the right mix of products that meet both your monitoring and management needs.

So what kinds of capabilities should you look for in a network management system? In this post, I'll focus on the generalities, and then in subsequent posts, I'll discuss specific vendors that might be useful to you.

First, because change is a constant, not only in business but in life, too, IT must keep the network up and running regardless of moves, additions and changes. While network management solutions were once built solely to manage devices, now they're more complex because they have to manage new types of traffic – such as voice and streaming video which are very latency sensitive. Plus, now that private corporate networks are on the public Internet, there are new concerns that IT must be concerned about – such as traffic levels and security issues.

So, consequently, it's important to consider solutions that can monitor:

- network traffic

- end-user activities

- applications

- networking protocols

- servers

- network hardware

- virtual machines

- protocols

- cloud platforms

You need these elements for a complete end-to-end picture of network health.

These individual elements are necessary for the whole because, too often, when there are performance problems, the network is the first to be blamed. In fact, the problem could just as easily be an application glitch or trouble with end-user activities. Monitoring provides IT with a more proactive rather than reactive approach – as it will help mitigate problems before they happen and reduce mean time between failures.

Right now, unfortunately, most enterprise IT network departments use many disparate tools to try and improve visibility. Plus, IT departments are too often structured into distinct organizations, and that only compounds the problem because information isn't shared. For greater visibility, things must change, and IT groups must work to share information in order to be proactive.

Network management suites have expanded well beyond monitoring just devices, and this broader view helps networking engineers determine potential bottlenecks before they happen. Putting the right enterprise network management solution in place sheds light on the entire network and improves overall network stability and reliability.

At Monitis, our end-to-end monitoring system offers:

- True 1 min frequency monitoring simultaneously from multiple locations in America, Europe, Asia and Australia

- The ability to customize and set up your own monitoring locations

- No false alarms - failures verified across multiple locations

- Monitors websites, e-Mail servers, firewalls, VoIP, databases, Domain Name Servers, routers, Web Servers from end user perspective

- Supported protocols - HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, SMTP, POP3, IMAP, SSH, PING, TCP, UDP, SIP, MySQL, DNS.

- Internal server and network monitoring including CPU, Memory, Server Processes, Bandwidth, SNMP, telnet.

- Web page content check - specify string to be checked for existence/non-existence on web page

- WebMap view - see all your servers and web sites in the single map view