In today’s interconnected world, managing networks has become increasingly complex and extends across wired, wireless, and virtual IT environments. Network administrators are constantly in need of efficient tools to navigate this complexity. With numerous network management solutions available, it is crucial to identify the right one that strikes a balance between reliability, effectiveness, and affordability.
This blog explores the importance of network management tools and dives into the capabilities of OpManager, proactive network management software that promises to revolutionize your approach to network management.
A checklist of must-have capabilities for every network management tool
To navigate the complexities of today’s interconnected systems, a robust network management tool is indispensable. This checklist unveils the must-have capabilities that empower IT administrators to seamlessly handle administration, provisioning, maintenance, operations, and security, ensuring a resilient and high-performing network environment.
Administration
- Your IT admins must swiftly troubleshoot faults and restore the network to optimal conditions.
- Use comprehensive performance monitors to measure various network aspects, aiding in proactive fault resolution.
- Basic troubleshooting tools such as ping, traceroute, MIB browser, and remote control are essential.
- Network configuration capabilities are crucial for managing backups, ensuring compliance, and detecting configuration changes.
- Network assessment capabilities offer a birds-eye view of the infrastructure, aligning it with your business goals and shaping your network management strategy.
Network provisioning
- Allocating resources across the network according to varying demands is critical.
- Your IT admins should continuously monitor and analyze resource utilization to predict future usage patterns.
- Monitoring device upgrades, bandwidth usage, and disk and memory utilization helps you implement effective resource allocation.
- IP address management, switch port allocation, and user access capabilities should be utilized to control network provisioning.
Maintenance
- Your IT admins, as part of their daily routines, should anticipate faults before they’re able to disrupt end users.
- A dependable network management tool is essential for early fault detection, isolation, and troubleshooting.
Swift alarm triggers will facilitate prompt fault resolution. - The network monitoring tool you use should track the performance, availability, and health of all network devices, presenting IT admins with a clear snapshot on the web console using performance data collected through SNMP/WMI/CLI protocols.
Operations
- You must account for the daily challenges your IT admins will face, including the gradual decline in network performance.
- Ensuring consistent adherence to service level agreements (SLAs) and delivering quality IT services is achievable only with a powerful network management tool.
- Your goal is to secure 99.9% availability for both the network and business-critical applications.
- A network monitoring tool with business-level dashboards will provide you real-time insights into factors affecting your business operations.
Security
- Security-related network management requires network monitoring tools with an AI or ML-based smart alerting engine.
- Additional capabilities are crucial to detect and prevent breaches, ensuring a seamless network experience.
- Analyzing network device activity logs and closely monitoring network bandwidth exposes suspicious activity.
- The network management tool you use should provide deep visibility into firewall activity and real-time analysis of network bandwidth and traffic by leveraging flow technologies.
Automation
- Modern network management encompasses repetitive and time-consuming tasks that challenge IT teams.
- Workflow and automation features come in handy for your admins, streamlining operations, reducing stress on the workforce, and simplifying troubleshooting.
OpManager: Empowering seamless network management excellence
Network management involves addressing various critical aspects, and OpManager stands out as a comprehensive enterprise solution.
Fault identification and troubleshooting: OpManager excels in proactively detecting, isolating, and troubleshooting faults to minimize network outages. It conducts meticulous monitoring of switches, routers, servers, and storage devices, analyzing their availability, health, and performance. OpManager provides real-time insights, enabling administrators to swiftly detect and address network issues.
Network performance monitoring and management: OpManager aids in resource management through capacity planning reports and IP address and switch port management. It plays a vital role in maintaining quality of service (QoS) to meet SLAs and ensure high availability for critical applications.
Capacity planning and resource management: OpManager aids in network provisioning and resource management through capacity planning reports and IP address and switch port management.
Workflow automation: OpManager introduces workflows for automated, on-demand, and scheduled tasks, reducing repetitive and time-consuming efforts for administrators and technicians. With around 80 supported actions, OpManager’s workflows automate tasks like service restarts, VM operations, script execution, and network configuration backups.
Configuration and change management: The advanced configuration management facilitated by OpManager’s NCM module ensures network configurations are backed up, policy violations are addressed, and unauthorized changes are detected and remediated. In essence, OpManager emerges as a powerful and versatile network management solution that caters to the diverse needs of modern network administrators.
OpManager is a part of ManageEngine’s suite of ITOM 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.
