Network Security
Vulnerability Management
Privileged Access Management
Endpoint Security
Threat Hunting
Unified Endpoint Management
Email & Collaboration Security
Contents:
Maybe you’re wondering why it’s important to have Network Monitoring System put in place.
Taking into consideration the fact that today’s Businesses rely on their network to perform at the levels we know for sure that they require to satisfy their clients’ demands.
We know that issues related to performance and network outages are incredibly costly to your company, therefore, a network performance solution allows any type of company to proactively deal with performance problems whilst allowing you to gain valuable insights into your network.
What Is Network Monitoring?
The term network monitoring is well-known throughout the IT industry, with Network monitoring representing a critical IT process in which all networking components such as routers, switches, firewalls, servers, and VMs are monitored for fault and performance and constantly evaluated in order to maintain and optimize their availability.
How can you ensure that your Network Monitoring System is delivering?
Proactivity is one of the most important parts of this specific process, meaning that it holds great importance to find performance issues and bottlenecks proactively, therefore Efficiently preventing network downtime or failures.
Pay attention to the essentials.
Any network is created of devices, therefore any faulty network devices can impact the performance of the network.
By constantly monitoring the network and its related devices this type of risk can be eliminated.
First of all, we need to identify the devices and also the related performance metrics that need to be monitored.
The next step is to decide and put in place a monitoring interval; this will be different depending on the type of device that needs to be monitored: desktops and printers are not critical, whereas servers, routers, and switches, are devices that are performing business-critical tasks but at the same time have specific parameters that can be selectively monitored.
Establish the Monitoring interval.
In this way, the frequency at which the network devices and their related metrics are polled will be determined, in order to be able to identify the performance and also the availability status.
The monitoring interval is dependent on the type of network device or parameter that needs monitoring. The CPU and memory stats can be monitored once every 5 minutes whilst the monitoring interval for other metrics such as Disk utilization could be extended to be polled once every 15 minutes. It’s unnecessary to monitor the devices more often as this action could load to the network.
Alongside monitoring a network and its devices, another good practice that should be put in place is to adopt a secure and non-bandwidth-consuming network management protocol. This is meant to minimize the impact on network performance. Some of the most widely accepted protocols support SNMP(Simple Network Management Protocol) and CLI protocols, for Linux-operated machines, whilst as long Windows devices are using the WMI protocol.
The importance of proactive monitoring and thresholds.
It’s well-known that network downtime can be quite expensive, having the end-user report a network issue to the network management team.
It is challenging to monitor networks in real-time in order to identify bottlenecks in a proactive approach, and this action in itself is what we are considering to be a threshold.
Configuring the thresholds is very helpful when proactively monitoring the resources and services running on servers and network devices, in this way each and every device can have a threshold value set that is based on user preference and needs.
What are High Availability and Fail-over?
Unfortunately, sometimes unexpected things happen; let’s say that your Network Monitoring System is running on a server that crashes or loses network connection.
In this case, you want to be alerted and if possible to have the situation automatically remedied. This is possible when using a back-up/stand-by of another twin network monitor application installation.
When talking about high availability we are referring to the continuous availability of a monitoring system, that allows any incident like unhealthy bandwidth levels, DoS attacks, etc., to be immediately brought to your attention.
Failover and fail-back functionalities are created to ensure the fact that a network environment is always monitored by utilizing a secondary standby server, in this way, if an incident occurs the secondary server is available to take over and the database remains secure, thus ensuring 100% uptime.
The Failover system feature comes with plenty of benefits, such as, immediately recognizing the primary server failure, sending a notification via email in event of a primary server failure, 100% uptime, and automated, seamless switch between the Primary server to Standby server.
Network Monitoring solutions and their importance.
The monitoring network is now an important aspect of managing any IT infrastructure. You can create your ideal setting with no digital boundaries, where you can prevent, detect, and block threats and proactively hunt for DNS-based threats to spot users and processes at risk.
Stop unknown threats from reaching your Endpoints or Perimeter with a unique security suite and filter traffic at the DNS, HTTP, and HTTPS layers.
Heimdal® Network DNS Security
- No need to deploy it on your endpoints;
- Protects any entry point into the organization, including BYODs;
- Stops even hidden threats using AI and your network traffic log;
- Complete DNS, HTTP and HTTPs protection, HIPS and HIDS;
HEIMDAL™ Threat Prevention empowers you to move beyond signature-based detection and block attacks that Antivirus will never recognize.
Dora is a digital marketing specialist within Heimdal™ Security. She is a content creator at heart - always curious about technology and passionate about finding out everything there is to know about cybersecurity.
