NMSaaS Blog

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.

Your goal is always to improve your business, and much of this is dependent upon your IT department and what takes place.

Have you ever wondered which of Cisco CCIEs, influencers, and thought leaders are on Twitter?

If you've looked at cloud computing, you've run into the "as a service" alphabet soup. The big ones are Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (Paas), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). They just indicate how "close to the metal" the service brings you.

Everywhere we turn, there's something new being written about the craze for cloud-based solutions, many of which fall under the SaaS category. We live in a world in which nearly every kind of business activity can be packaged and marketed "as a service." The only requirement for a software service, for example, is that the vendor finds a buyer who's willing to pay the asking price. Modern buyers want to ensure that their purchases provide something that helps them meet their goals, which may be personal or business in nature.

While government agencies must by their nature be somewhat more conservative in utilizing new technologies, cloud-based network monitoring has reached a level where it hasn’t yet been widely adopted, but has all the rigorous testing and tweaking necessary to make it a safe bet.

With that in mind, many agencies have begun considering a move to the cloud for their network monitoring—and those which haven’t ought to.

Here’s a few of the considerations that make this a worthwhile move:

Cloud-based network monitoring is quickly becoming a staple among business organizations of any size.

However, the tools and resources available through cloud based network monitoring are also applicable to government agencies, and can be implemented to vastly improve any agency's current customer service capabilities.

Fortunately, getting started with network monitoring is fairly simple with the help of a professional monitoring service.