A highly functional IT network is the basis of any successful modern business, and for effective operations, organizations must monitor the health and availability of all their IT infrastructure components and ensure they’re up and running 24×7.
Uptime is the duration during which a network component is reachable and capable of operating efficiently. Typical networks use ICMP or TCP to communicate with devices and identify idle or inactive ones.
Why does uptime need to be monitored?
In the last five years, the cost of downtime—the duration during which an IT infrastructure component is not available—has grown tremendously for businesses of all sizes. An hour of network unavailability can cost somewhere between $1 million and $5 million.
Even 99 percent availability of a network device over the course of a year results in three and a half days of unproductive, costly downtime. This emphasizes the importance of monitoring network availability.
Any large network contains an assortment of devices and interfaces. Simultaneously monitoring the availability and health of all these components is a mammoth task. This problem is compounded when monitoring devices across several remote sites around the globe.
Challenges in monitoring network uptime
In the early years of computing, device uptime was monitored manually—a simple task since the entire network was managed by a small team of trained technicians whose only job was to interpret and respond to output lights on the control panel (hardware-based functionality for monitoring availability and functionality). However, as time progressed, network monitoring evolved and simplified several processes, including uptime monitoring. Let’s look at the challenges in monitoring the uptime of network infrastructure.
Managing a complex network
As an organization scales, its IT network grows as well. When a large number of devices belonging to different categories and manufactured by different vendors are added to your IT infrastructure, the complexity in managing their uptime drastically shoots up.
Handling a flood of alerts
Threshold-based alerts are the quickest way to identify a device that is on the verge of failure. However, during events like parent device failure or a server not responding, multiple alerts will be generated, burying you in a seemingly endless array of alert messages. Besides flooding your alert window, this will also hinder your ability to identify problems and quickly restore normalcy.
There are solutions for such cases. Deep, proactive monitoring; reporting; and setting the right amount of threshold alerts helps keep you in control of your network infrastructure by identifying potential device failure in advance, giving you the time to deploy your incident response team to act on the issue immediately.
Identifying and troubleshooting network issues
When experiencing device downtime, quickly identifying the root cause and troubleshooting your network before the issue impacts the end-user will make a world of difference. Identifying the issue will allow you to notify the team managing the affected devices so they can rapidly correlate data to identify and work on the issue rather than waste precious time analyzing the root cause.
Gaining greater visibility across the network
You should be aware of the various applications running and conversations happening in the network. Visibility across all features of your network will help you quickly identify trouble when it is brewing and address it even before it impacts your end-users.
Uptime monitoring in OpManager
Failure to identify network availability pitfalls will result in painful downtime and could cost thousands of dollars in lost revenue. OpManager’s uptime monitoring feature offers the most fitting solution for this IT pain point.
- Out-of-the-box, scheduled health reports ensure you stay updated on the availability of the various aspects of your infrastructure components (services, Windows processes, websites, process monitors, etc.) at all times.
- Color-coded uptime graphs provide an up-to-date, holistic view of the status of your infrastructure components’ availability.
- Role-based access control eliminates human intervention, drastically reducing human error.
- The real-time, interactive dashboard provides in-depth, at-a-glance insights into network availability and performance with widgets like HeatMap. This allows you to spot network issues quickly and act on them before they blow out of control.
- Drastically minimize device failure by proactively monitoring the internal health of your network and employing regular preventive maintenance measures.
- Eliminate unstable configuration effects on live devices with rollback or backup operations.
- Gain a live, graphical representation of your remote deployments across the globe with customizable business views.
- Keep tabs on your network security issues with Firewall Log Analysis and Rogue IP Detection, and prevent them from disrupting business continuity.
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