Uninterrupted Enterprise Network Monitoring

Much has been said and written about how important it is for networks to be highly available and how critical it is for a business, given the pace at which an enterprise network grows, and how the dynamics keep evolving and changing over time.  When the networks grow to accommodate the demands of an expanding enterprise business, the enterprise monitoring needs seem to get more and more complex.  Delivering high availability and disaster recovery is the mantra to successful, uninterrupted enterprise network monitoring. In this post, lets see how the high availability of an enterprise network can be ensured..

Ensuring high availability

To ensure uninterrupted enterprise network monitoring, a contingency plan detailing what must be done when there is a system failure or a site failure or maybe even a mishap, is essential. Before we proceed, it helps to understand that a thin line differentiates ‘failover’ from ‘disaster recovery’. Failover is a method employed by most enterprises to ensure that the system availability is resumed within an acceptable time-frame, whereas, ‘disaster recovery’ is a fallback strategy when all the failover strategies break.  Different enterprises employ different failover strategies that can be broadly categorized into cold, warm, or hot standbys, based on what is acceptable to their business.

As the enterprise business (and even those of SMBs) depends largely on the availability of various services, there are no two ways to continuous, uninterrupted network monitoring. As an administrator, you would look at the network monitoring software’s ability to quickly failover in the event of, say, a server crash, which by the way, is one of the myriad possibilities that can lead to interrupted and incomplete monitoring.  The worst of scenarios is where the entire site goes down due to a power outage, or owing to a natural phenomenon like an earth quake or a tsunami (fortunately such events are far and few between and hope that no one gets to suffer such a nightmare!). Whatever maybe the case, disaster preparedness is the only sure-shot way for a business to stay alive.

Failover for Enterprises

In the case of large enterprises, a cold or warm standby will not cut it. A cold start warrants manual intervention and warm start involves a backup running in the background with the data being mirrored to a secondary server at specified intervals. It is possible that the data on both servers is not synchronized all the time.  A hot standby becomes a clear gating factor for a software that manages fault and network performance of critical systems and services.

A hot standby failover is preferred because,

 i) the redundant systems run in parallel with a 100% data synchronization
ii) the users do not experience a glitch as the failover is smooth and almost instant.

Hot-standby in OpManager

More on setting-up single-site and multi-site redundancy in another post..