Understanding exactly what’s happening on your network in real-time through network visualization and analysis can give you the insight to shrink big problems into little, manageable ones.
Network visualization and analysis results in relaying information in meaningful ways to IT administrators. And it helps them resolve issues faster and with deep insight.
Every Car (and Network) Needs a Dashboard
Think about your network like a car. Without a windshield or dashboard you’re pretty much driving in the dark.
Network monitoring dashboards provide an at-a-glance viewpoint of the entire network. They quickly highlight any potential problems. Dashboards also allow for performance analysis and trend predictions.
Related Article: Best Practices Series: Network Mapping
A unified dashboard lets you visualize performance and network bandwidth and stay on top of network inventory and configuration issues.
While considering how you are going to approach network visualization and analysis, think about what you really need to view quickly. Things like:
- Health of the overall network
- Health of individual servers and applications
- Traffic throughout relevant devices
- Configuration of devices on the network
Reporting Provides the Deep Insight You Seek
Many IT departments are so busy putting out fires that they aren’t able to look deeper into how to improve the network. Comprehensive data in a report allows for intelligent decision-making when it comes to enhancing the network. The types of information that create deeper insights are:
- Total number of unresolved issues
- CPU utilization
- Application performance
- Rogue wireless activity
- Interface errors
Each of these data points hold the key to planning for increased capacity, network architecture validation and complying with service-level agreements (SLAs).
The right network monitoring software will be capable of constantly collecting and analyzing data from each of these components. The reports provided will create a cohesive understanding of network trends and performance metrics.
Network visualization and analysis empowers IT administrators to identify minor issues before they become major, while advanced reporting will help your entire infrastructure grow intelligently.