Network Device Monitoring

The Foundation of Network Monitoring

Network device monitoring is critical to device availability – the simple probability that the device is available, up and running. And since devices, in spite of their ruggedness, can fail, availability is usually expressed as the percentage of time the device is up and running during a set period. Thus, if a device is down (for any reason) one day out of every 100, it would be considered to have 99% availability.

Device availability is almost synonymous with network uptime, and reduced availability in one device can clog the entire traffic and the failure/below-par performance of a single component could cause bottlenecks that slow down entire networks.

Your network monitoring software should be able to provide insights into the availability quotients of all devices in the network, based on availability metrics including device status, time to respond and downtimes. Physical and virtual user nodes, smartphones, routers, switches, firewalls, and business-critical applications should have an assured level of availability. WAN links too should be monitored for availability, both for connection issues and related network failures, as well as for drawing up SLAs.

Network device monitoring software makes use of ICMP pings and SNMP messages to ensure each device is regularly contacted. Reporting is a necessary feature to look for here, since a network management system that can identify device failure and report almost immediately could result in lower downtimes.