NMSaaS Blog

Keeping your network up and running is critical to the success of your business. You want to be sure that you're giving it your best, from understanding exactly how your hardware and software interact and how to keep everything running smoothly to developing a strong understanding of the latest security threats to your network. By following these great blogs on network monitoring, you can deepen your knowledge, enhance your understanding, and keep your skills sharp. 

High availability is a key component of network performance.

Periods of internal unavailability reduce productivity and keep employees from having information at hand when it's needed. Unavailability of public services discourages customers and partners.

Availability monitoring lets an organization detect and fix any lapses quickly. It can help to prove that a service lives up to its service level agreements.

What monitoring does

The purpose of availability monitoring is to identify the failure of any server, service, or device on the network to respond within acceptable time limits.

It will report when the component fails to respond and when it becomes available again. Short periods of unavailability may simply be logged; if a component doesn't come back promptly, the monitor will issue an alert.

Loss of availability may have several causes:

Anyone working in the IT world knows that there will always be more software solutions on the market than an organization can afford.

In the world of Software-as-a-Service providers (SaaS), which is global in scale, this is truer than ever before. There are numerous solutions for your organization's IT needs, and your organization should use its internal purchasing process to adopt a best-fit solution.

Your final choice is not necessarily the best solution but one that your company can afford or easily integrate with existing systems.

With more business processes being automated each year and managed through cloud providers, we recommend that you're on the lookout for the most pressing SaaS solutions. You don't want to break the bank, but you do want to have a third-party system monitoring all of your applications in the cloud.

We wrote this piece to help you advocate for the best cloud monitoring services.

Continuous network interactive performance monitoring, looking for any delays, misconnections, or slow functioning in the network, is vital. 

Servers enable all the client computers in your network to work. They are the source of necessary operating system support and connectivity. If servers fail, even briefly, the fault will cause disruption over your entire system. The rest of the network (the client computers and peripherals) are like disk drives and extra I/O interfaces in the system. 

Optimal performance of connections between your servers and the other components will make the entire network function better. 

Less than optimal network performance is often caused by too much CPU usage that gets close to the capacity of the server, poor I/O performance in connecting to clients or I/O like disk drives elsewhere in the network. You may be able to reduce CPU use by distributing user access to reduce simultaneous use of the server or by balancing the load and distributing key data files onto separate drives.

The key to diagnosing network issues is to monitor your servers.

Break-ins and malware are constant threats to computer networks. It's no longer safe to assume that security software will keep all attackers out. An extra layer of defense is necessary, to catch threats that have started to take root and get rid of them as quickly as possible. It isn't unusual for hostile software to sit in a system for months before it's caught. While it's sitting there, it's using up network resources and landing its host on Internet blacklists. Network monitoring can catch abnormal activity and let administrators remove its source.

In the rough-and-tumble world of IoT development where moves, changes, mergers, and other assorted chaos often rules the scene, adaptability is king.

If your firm is involved in developing a cutting-edge IoT application or device, your network configuration, monitoring, and management system should not take the form of an inflexible behemoth meaning for example, a major software suite with predetermined parameters.  

Cloud based network management makes a heck of a lot more sense.

As with all things cloud, a fine cloud based network management solution is only there as long as you need it and is instantly scalable either up or down.  That's important when your project has to go through a major gear-shifting of one form or another or needs to be scrapped altogether in favor of a whole new, different move.  

In todays' computing world that is so infected with bad actors there is no skimping on IT management as it relates to security.  

Theoretically this means there is potentially no limit on the amount of money that might be spent to ensure IT security.  One thing is sure -- instant scalability is hugely helpful, both in terms of controlling costs and in terms of quickness of deployment.  

Network management through an excellent SaaS solution may be had very quickly and at finely controllable cost.  

Cisco provides a choice of ways to learn about the security vulnerabilities it reports. Users and administrators can check Cisco's security page. They can subscribe to a mailing list, an RSS feed, or a notification service. The most versatile option is the PSIRT OpenVuln API. It's lets organizations run applications to monitor and respond to vulnerabilities in customized ways. They can use existing applications or create their own.

In creating OpenVuln, Cisco is aiming not only to present information in more adaptable ways, but to encourage the development of open security automation standards.

OpenVuln lets a custom application get the latest information through a REST API. RESTful queries are equivalent to HTTP URLs, so an application can use Web-related code libraries to do much of the work. The information can come back in XML or JSON format, following five standards:

• CVE, Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures.

• CVSS, Common Vulnerability Scoring System.

• CVRF, Common Vulnerability Reporting Framework.

• OVAL, Open Vulnerability and Assessment Language (only for Cisco IOS advisories).

• CWE, Common Weakness Enumeration.

NMSaaS are delighted to reveal that we will be attending and exhibiting at MSPExpo, this month, February 8th to 10th at Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Network monitoring provides valuable information about your servers' performance.

To get the most out of it, you need to understand the performance metrics which it reports.

Some metrics apply to any server which provides data; others refer to special server types, such as SQL and Web servers.

General metrics

Any server has maximum rates at which it can send and receive data. This is often called "bandwidth," but a more precise term is channel capacity. (Bandwidth, strictly speaking, is an analog property.) No matter what you do, you won't send and receive data faster than the channel capacity. It's rare that you'll even come close to it.

The highest data rates that you actually achieve are a more meaningful metric. Many factors will affect the practical maximum: the other devices on the network, the quality of the transmission medium, the software in use, the block size, the degree of disk fragmentation, and so on. If data rates decrease over time, it's worth investigating the cause. If the data rate often approaches the channel capacity, the server hardware may be limiting its performance.

Network monitoring isn't just for telling you how your business's system metrics are doing now, but for getting a historical context.