An Overview of Open Source Tools for Network Monitoring
Network monitoring is crucial in enterprises. This article discusses its various advantages and highlights a few network monitoring tools. Systems admins will benefit greatly by familiarising themselves with these tools.
Today, computers, smartphones and the Internet have become our lifelines. Many of us consider them necessary for our day to day life, especially this revolutionary 4G phenomenon. We get annoyed the instant our mobile Internet network degrades from 4G to 3G, resulting in slow buffering when downloading any video. Hence, it has become important and also a bit challenging for different network providers to meet the expectations of their customers by continuously providing uninterrupted network services. In order to be true to customers’ expectations, different network providers need to closely and continuously monitor the network services they provide to ensure network supply without any outages. Sometimes, an intermediate component may be slow or may even fail, leading to slow processing of data in the network. Since it is difficult to monitor and keep a track of each network service manually, different tools or systems are used to monitor performance and take corrective measures if it does not meet expectations.
According to Wikipedia, network monitoring is the usage of a system that constantly monitors a computer network for slow or failing components and notifies the network administrator via email, pager or other alarms in case of any outages or trouble.
In addition, network monitoring also takes care of the performance and utilisation of the network and predicts the possible outcomes of any threat to it, thereby preventing the system from a possible major outage in the future. Network failures, server downtime, service or application crashes can seriously threaten a business’ operations, resulting in the loss of thousands of rupees in revenue and productivity. Hence, by using network monitoring solutions, a company can deliver a better service as well as cut costs by fixing issues before any of its users notice a problem.