Network Monitoring: Why is it important?

Changes in the way we work have had significant implications for business cybersecurity, not least when it comes to network monitoring. A working network is the backbone of any business, and through continuous monitoring, a network should ensure reliability, maximum staff performance, and robust security.

What is Network Monitoring?

Network monitoring is a tool used to identify and send out alerts regarding issues affecting the availability or functionality of network services. Administrators typically monitor the availability of network services, the functionality of network interfaces, the status of critical hardware systems, CPU, memory, or other statistics for servers and devices on a network.

In other words, administrators use network monitoring tools to ensure critical systems in the network are available and functioning properly.

Consistent network monitoring and analysis are important for:

• Understanding a network’s baseline statistics — helps administrators notice and respond to abnormal behavior.
• Governing networks — prevent unwanted or unauthorized changes, including misconfigurations, shadow IT, and possible security threats by insiders or outside attackers.
• Identifying critical issues — which can cause network slowdown or failure, before they result in a problem.
• When a problem already occurs — helps to identify the root cause and resolve it.

Why is Network Monitoring necessary?

Network failures can lead to business disruptions, which can mean a loss of customers, employee productivity, and money. In fact, 91% of mid-sized and large enterprises report that a single hour of IT downtime costs them at least USD 300,000 per hour. Almost half of that group said it costs in the millions.

Investing in network monitoring software, whether commercial or open-source, means taking a proactive approach to keeping your network infrastructure healthy and maximizing uptime – instead of waiting until an end user reports network problems. Because infrastructure monitoring lets you know precisely where a network problem occurs, there’s time for troubleshooting before the situation leads to an outage. Early identification and resolution of a problem’s root cause can reduce response time, improve customer satisfaction, save money, and protect a company’s reputation.

How does it work?

It’s possible to keep tabs on your network in several different ways. Testing a web server could involve sending an HTTP request to load a specific page and recording the time it takes to receive the response while administrating an email system could involve sending out dummy emails and analyzing the response time.

The first step is to catalog the available hardware, software, and network connections, along with any relevant performance indicators. The next step is for the company to establish a regular monitoring schedule for each process. In contrast to the routers, switches, and servers that make up the network’s backbone, client devices like laptops and printers are not considered “network essential” and can have significantly longer monitoring intervals.

The simple network management protocol (SNMP) is used by the majority of network monitoring products for management and monitoring purposes. Most network components come with an SNMP agent that can be used to change settings, take a device offline if it’s acting abnormally, or simply gather statistics. To prevent premature device failure, monitoring systems ping each port on the system to check for any abnormalities. Pings are sent to various nodes in a network anywhere from once per minute to once per hour.

The Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) is used by some networking hardware like routers and switches to communicate IP-related operation data and generate error messages when hardware fails.

Key benefits of network monitoring

Clear visibility into the network

Through network monitoring, administrators can get a clear picture of all the connected devices in the network. See how data is moving among them, and quickly identify and correct issues that can undermine performance and lead to outages.

Increasing complexity

Modern enterprises rely on a host of internet-dependent, business-critical services. This includes cloud service providers, ISPs, and CDNs, as well as SaaS, UCaaS, VPNs, and SECaaS providers. Each service operates over the internet, making it susceptible to performance fluctuations caused by internet outages or routing issues. Visibility into the network components beyond your control allows you to monitor issues that might impact employees or customers.

Better use of IT resources

The hardware and software tools in network monitoring systems reduce manual work for IT teams. That means valuable IT staff have more time to devote to critical projects for the organization.

Early insight into future infrastructure needs

Network monitoring systems can provide reports on how network components have performed over a defined period. By analyzing these reports, network administrators can anticipate when the organization may need to consider upgrading or implementing new IT infrastructure.

The ability to identify security threats faster

Network monitoring helps organizations understand what “normal” performance looks like for their networks. So, when unusual activity occurs, such as an unexplained increase in network traffic levels, it’s easier for administrators to identify the issue quickly–and to determine whether it may be a security threat.

What are the types of Network Monitoring?

Different devices and protocols are used in network monitoring.

• Network packet analyzers examine the data in each packet moving through the network, and the information within the packets can determine if they are being routed correctly, if employees are visiting prohibited websites, or if sensitive data including personally identifiable information (PII) such as social security number is being exfiltrated from the network.
• Application and services monitoring focuses on those systems and devices needed to maintain network integrity to ensure they are operating within normal limits as well as indicating which applications are being used by which business units organization-wide.
• Access Management monitoring ensures that intruders are not granted access to network resources, for example, if an employee suddenly logs on from an IP address on another continent. This can quickly spot network vulnerabilities help remediate them and detect intruders before they can do harm.

Some Challenges

Today’s networks are enormous and intricate, moving millions of packets per second. Traditionally, network engineers have used flow logs to examine traffic between two IP addresses, manual SSH logins to servers, or remote access to network equipment to conduct diagnostics when difficulties arise.

There is a lack of contextual data from applications and infrastructure, which might help pinpoint the core cause of potential network difficulties, and the processes don’t scale well.

When businesses make the transition to the cloud, engineers also confront difficulties in monitoring the networks. The dynamic and transient nature of cloud workloads and their underlying infrastructure increases network complexity. In the cloud, temporary instances may pop up and go away as demand shifts.

The IP addresses of these cloud instances are dynamically assigned when they are started and stopped, making it difficult to trace web associations using IP address pairs alone. The grid attachments between meaningful things, such as services or pods, can’t be monitored by many monitoring technologies.

Since the cloud provider manages the system framework, network problems are often out of the client’s control. This means that workloads have to be moved to a different availability zone or region until the problem is fixed.