An Ethernet connection helps businesses with critical communication, and even a slight interruption can irritate users or result in costly downtime. On top of this, the larger the network, the more complex the Ethernet network becomes. Since the Ethernet network determines the availability, performance, and consistency of the larger network infrastructure, it’s important to deploy Ethernet monitoring software in your network to help you measure every critical Ethernet metric, such as transmission rates, availability, and health.

Top 5 challenges of Ethernet monitoring in 2022

The problem with Ethernet is that it can be astonishingly complex, making it difficult for admins to monitor its health and availability without an effective Ethernet monitoring tool. However, there are various Ethernet monitoring tools available on the market and you need to carefully select a tool that can simplify the following challenges:

  1. Identifying the critical Ethernet interfaces

  2. Identifying the root cause of Ethernet malfunctions

  3. Acquiring in-depth visualization

  4. Lowering the meantime to resolve (MTTR)

5. Seeing the bigger picture of long-term Ethernet consistency

Identifying the critical Ethernet interfaces 

Not all Ethernet interfaces in a large-scale network are crucial, which is why it’s important to identify the critical interfaces that matter and add value. For instance, the interface that connects two crucial devices can be facilitating some important communication and a minor interruption can cause users to loose connectivity. This is why it’s important to identify critical interfaces at the infrastructure level and closely monitor them with a proactive Ethernet monitoring solution.

Identifying the root cause of Ethernet malfunctions 

There are a plethora of factors that cause Ethernet malfunction such as incorrect DNS settings configuration, network congestion, and defective cabling, but manually finding the accurate cause for the malfunction remains a tiring task in larger networks. Admins in large networks need Ethernet monitoring software that offers various Ethernet monitors to help them drill down to the root cause of problems.

Acquiring in-depth visualization 

Ethernet networks are complicated, so the complete impact of issues can be challenging to identify and estimate unless you’re able to visualize the entire network infrastructure from a single pane of glass.

Ethernet monitoring tools can offer centralized visualization, enabling you to prioritize the critical interface connections between crucial devices and monitor interface traffic, errors and discards, discard rates, interface utilization, error rates, and packets transmitted or received per second. With the use of graphs and charts, you can determine the monitored interface’s availability status at a single glance.

Incorporating an Ethernet monitoring solution provides IT admins with the ability to visualize the topography, demography, and business-level monitoring of critical interfaces using advanced capabilities such as business views. It also offers you proactive monitoring of other critical metrics to optimize Ethernet performance via a real-time intuitive dashboard.

Lowering the MTTR

Because of the complexity of Ethernet devices and larger networks, the response time to IT issues needs to be as quick as possible, since it’s one of the major interfaces that’s used for a lot of crucial communication. To help with this situation, IT admins need a proactive alerting system and appropriate threshold settings. Incident management teams also need to be notified instantly at the first sign of trouble.

One of the critical factors that helps in lowering MTTR is automation, which is why your Ethernet monitoring strategy should allow you to perform basic fault management tasks like terminating or restarting an application. With the right Ethernet monitoring solution, you can carefully set threshold limits and activate proactive alerting that can send notifications to the desired stakeholders through the right channels for a faster fix.

Seeing the bigger  picture of long-term Ethernet consistency  

Since manually checking the Ethernet status can be quite draining, utilizing historical Ethernet status data can help you with identifying patterns, recurring problems, and setting apt thresholds. Detailed reports of in and out traffic, discards, bandwidth, and outages can help you with strategizing a capacity plan for potential future mishaps.

Organizations with large networks need an Ethernet monitoring tool that can offer seamless monitoring, identify past patterns, and curate predictive capacity planning.

OpManager:  A highly informative and proactive Ethernet monitoring tool

ManageEngine OpManager is an effective Ethernet monitoring software that monitors crucial interfaces and provides in-depth insights on the availability and performance of all the interface connections in your network infrastructure to prevent outages.

OpManager offers:

  • Real-time monitoring of custom parameters across crucial Ethernet interfaces.

  • Intuitive visualization capabilities to help with informed decisions.

  • Instantaneous alerts to avoid network mishaps.

  • The ability to associate custom fields to help in-field teams recognize and fix issues quickly.

  • Automation of monotonous Ethernet fault management tasks.

  • Built-in reports on past performance patterns, health and availability statuses, and types of issues that have occurred for better decision-making.

If you’d like to know more about OpManager and what it has to offer, download OpManager’s free, 30-day trial today!