Network monitoring is a vital IT operation that helps organizations keep the business functioning without technical disruptions. To help shoulder the burden of network management for IT operations team and ensure the organization is free from network downtime, organizations turn to network monitoring tools. This is why selecting the best network monitoring tool for your organization is a crucial decision to make.
There are a plethora of network monitoring solutions of varying capabilities to sift through. Your goal should be to track important metrics and gain an overview of your network irrespective of its size and scale.
In the efforts to identify the best network monitoring solution for your business, preparing a checklist of must-haves can help you narrow your options down and make decision-making simpler.
The vendor of your network monitoring solution should strive for improvement with the customer in mind: A customer-centric approach is a sign that a business is here for the long term. The ideal vendor treats its customers as a community and uses it as a think-tank that offers new suggestions to improve the tool. With this back and forth, the vendor can continuously improve the features and capabilities of its offerings—a win-win on both sides.
Transparent and affordable pricing: Pricing is an important factor in making any purchase. Some network monitoring solutions may have hidden costs, which may build distrust going forward.
Compatibility with other vendors: Many businesses subscribe to multiple vendors for communication, support, etc. If the network monitoring solution doesn’t have integrations with other vendors, processes might conflict and new problems could arise. This should be kept in mind while evaluating network monitoring solutions. Purchasing from a vendor that offers a wide range of integration options with other IT management software enables seamless network monitoring with full compatibility.
Customizability: Organizations have different network sizes, require different technological capabilities, and belong to a wide variety of industries. As a result, the needs will vary for the IT operations teams depending on the organization. Customization options give IT operations teams access to metrics that matter for their organization, allowing them to create a dashboard with custom key performance metrics. This makes sure that no time is wasted searching for critical information.
Intelligent alerting features: The network monitoring solution should have smart alerting and notifications features that can raise alarms to specific teams. This ensures that issues are sent to the right professional that can resolve them. Alarms can also be categorized according to severity, letting organizations solve critical issues first before moving on to resolve relatively minor alerts.
Troubleshooting for problems and root cause analysis: An ideal network monitoring solution should also be a capable network diagnostics tool. The tool should not only be able to alert about issues, but also show where the problems are and what caused them. Network diagnostics ensure that uptime and availability monitoring happens non-stop, with the IT operations team able to access troubleshooting tools whenever problems arise. An administrator can get to the bottom of every issue using root cause analysis whenever a network alert is raised.
Scalability: Network size and scale never remains stagnant in an organization. New applications, tools, and components are added along with evolving security and compliance standards. Always evaluate whether the network monitoring solution can keep up with the capacity plans of the organization.
Information-rich, comprehensive display: Monitoring a complex set of network components translates into a lot of data collection. All of this data should then be presented as graphs, tables, charts, heat maps, donut views, color-coded alerts, custom reports, and other actionable information on the dashboard so that you can take quick action to prevent outages from happening.
OpManager, a comprehensive network monitoring tool:
-
Provides transparent pricing with no hidden costs. Constant builds and updates released at no extra charge make OpManager one of the foremost network monitoring tools available now.
-
Offers add-ons including NetFlow Analyzer, Network Configuration Manager, Firewall Analyzer, Applications Manager, and OpUtils, giving you a holistic monitoring experience. You can also utilize integrations with products like ServiceDesk Plus, Analytics Plus, ServiceNow, AlarmsOne, and REST API to make your job simpler.
-
Provides advanced visualization with custom options for every monitoring need, from scheduling to reporting.
-
Supports a wide range of vendors and offers over 52,000 device templates with customization options.
OpManager is a part of ManageEngine’s ITOM suite of solutions. Apart from network monitoring, this suite also offers solutions for streamlining server monitoring, application monitoring, bandwidth monitoring, configuration management, firewall security and compliance, and IP address and switch port management. This is why ManageEngine’s ITOM solutions are the ideal choice for over one million IT admins worldwide.
