Effective Network Monitoring with IXIA

What is active monitoring and why should you incorporate it into your business network strategy?

In the simplest of terms, active monitoring allows your business to find and fix issues before they cause you bigger more expensive problems.

Enterprise networks are growing bigger than ever before. This allows for increase satisfaction, productivity, and efficiency than ever before. However, at the same time this means that networks are getting more complex and the risks of them failing are getting bigger.

This means that the old methods of network monitoring where we only say that a network is down are not enough anymore. If you wait to react, you will lose too much money. Rather, we need to focus on methods that allow us to find and fix problems before they are a problem.

The three main approaches to network monitoring are equipment polling, packet data monitoring, and active monitoring (also known as synthetic monitoring). All of these have their inherent advantages and disadvantages. Namely:

Equipment polling is the easiest way to passively monitor; however, it does not work as well as networks get more complex and don't offer proactive solutions.

Packet Data Monitoring offers a better method to monitor real-time traffic; however, similar to equipment polling it is also not good at offering proactive solutions.

Active Monitoring simulates traffic to proactively find issues before they become real problems.

This might make you think that you should only be using active monitoring. It is true that business, especially ones using large distributed networks, should be using proactive monitoring methods. However, it is also important to realize that all 3 of these methods are extremely important. For example, active monitoring will never be able to fully predict every bad situation that comes your way. As such, it is important to analyze real-time traffic to find problems.

Now that you better understand the importance of network monitoring as a modern business, what are the advantages of implementing specifically active monitoring into your business network?

One of the biggest advantages of active monitoring is preventing costly network outages by identifying problems before deployment. For example, before you might have deployed software network-wide and see it crash the first day. This would cause significant delays, frustration by the user, and money to the company trying to find the root source of the problem. However, with proactive monitoring simulation tools, you can find and fix issues before they slow down your project, give your clients a headache, or cost you any money.

Another advantage of active monitoring is high-quality service with end to end monitoring. One of the biggest problems that many networks have is that the only source of information when there is a problem is the user. However, the user is not always the best source of information. They might be able to tell you that there is a problem, but they can't tell you exactly what the problem is. With proactive monitoring, you can actively test your system so that you can understand what the problem is to implement the correct solution. This is especially helpful in real-time voice and video-based conferencing software.

Also, with the rapidly increasing migration to cloud computing, active monitoring offers a lot of solutions. Namely, it helps business networks safely move over to the cloud without compromising network performance.

Lastly, active monitoring allows networks to track every step of the process. In other words, they can track where problems such as faulty nodes are causing issues. This becomes even more important as networks are becoming even more branched and distributed than ever before.