Network Monitoring Solution

Network Monitoring Helps You To Optimize Your Network Infrastructure

Network Monitoring is essential for companies of any size and branch, to ensure that their computer systems are running performantly and no outages occur. A network monitoring tool is important to increase the efficency of your network by understanding bandwidth and ressource consumption.

We can devide the Network Monitoring arena into three segments:

1. Availability (uptime) monitoring
2. Usage monitoring
3. Activity montoring

Network uptime monitoring offers the following benefits:

• Increased profits: no losses caused by undetected system failures.
• Improved customer satisfaction by providing more reliable systems.
• Peace of mind: As long as you do not hear from the monitoring tool you know everything is running fine.
• Free valuable time to take care of other important busines.

A software for usage monitoring is the key to:

• Avoid bandwidth and server performance bottlenecks.
• Find out what applications or what servers use up your bandwidth.
• Deliver better quality of service to your users by being proactive.
• Reduce costs by buying bandwidth and hardware according to actual load.

Activity monitoring enables a precise network behavioural analysis (NBA):

• Allow protocols for different roles.
• Identify sudden spikes caused by malicious code immediately.

Requirements For a Network Monitoring Solution

A good network monitorig solution should easily be installed and usage should be intuitive so that there is no need for external consultancy and training. Further necessary requirements are:

• Remote Management via web browser, PocketPC, or Windows client
• Notifications about outages by email, ICQ, pager/SMS, and more.
• Comprehensive sensor type selection
• Multiple location monitoring
• All common methods for network usage data acquisition (SNMP, Packet Sniffing, Xflow) have to be supported.

PRTG Network Monitor is the tool for availability, usage and activity monitoring, covering the entire scope from pure website monitoring to database performance monitoring. The freeware or trial of PRTG Network Monitor can quickly be downloaded and easily be set up and configured.

Network Monitoring - Knowing What to Monitor

Merely implementing a network monitoring solution for your network isn't enough. The real work begins after you've chosen and installed a monitoring solution. Yet many IT managers and systems administrators often find themselves unsure of what to monitor after finally selecting and implementing their network monitoring solutions. The key to effective network monitoring is ensuring that a solution is configured to monitor what are essentially a network's vital signs - or triplets: availability, speed and usage.

Users who monitor network availability will ensure that both internal and external parties can access the services within their LANs, including Websites. They can also determine if their mail servers and leased lines are working, as well as if their network service providers are adhering to their SLAs.

Users who monitor network speed will ensure that their websites and network services don't lose visitors or frustrate users due to slow-loading pages, files or images. Users who monitor speed can determine how traffic - or stress - affects performance and how to plan for surges in traffic. Most importantly monitoring speed allows to identify traffic patterns and proactively install network upgrades before slowloading pages test the patience of clients or employees.

Users who monitor usage can accurately assess CPU load and learn just what sort of work their servers are doing at different points in the day. Monitoring usage and spped is also essential for a company to ensure its disparate pieces of hardware are operating at optimum levels - or doing their jobs.

Software Versus Service

There are two options for a network monitoring solution. You can purchase and setup a network monitoring software like PRTG Network Monitor by your own, or you can benefit from network monitoring services provided by an ASP.

Which option (software or service) is the right one for you depends on various factors. You can read more about the on-demand service for network monitoring.

How to Set Up Your Network Monitoring

With PRTG Network Monitor data acquisition technologies and the various infrastructure options in use today it can sometimes get complicated to decide which monitoring technology is right for your problem.

The easiest configuration is to monitor the local traffic of one PC by installing PRTG directly on it. This scenario is used to monitor a single PC in a LAN network or to monitor a PC connected to the Internet via DSL, modem, or cable.

For other network configurations you find detailed setup instructions in our knowledge base.

Interfaces and Modules for Ethernet can also be found under Cisco Network Modules, Cisco Port Adapters, and Cisco Transceiver Modules.

Models (10)

Cisco 3201 Fast Ethernet Switch Mobile Interface Card



Cisco 2600/2600 16-Pt 10/100 EtherSwitch NM with 1 GE (1000BaseT) Port



Cisco 16-Port 10/100 EtherSwitch NM with In-Line Power and GE



Cisco 16-Port 10/100 EtherSwitch NM with In-Line Power Support



Cisco Catalyst 6500 48-Port 10/100/1000 Premier WC Ethernet Module



Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series 48-Port 10/100/1000 WC Ethernet Module



Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series 4-Port 10 Gigabit Ethernet Module



Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series Enhanced 16-Port Gigabit Ethernet Module



Cisco Gigabit Ethernet Switch Module (CGESM) for HP



Cisco IGESM & Cisco Fiber IGESM Switch Module for IBM