Network Infrastructure Monitoring

Network infrastructure monitoring allows network admins to troubleshoot performance issues more efficiently and effectively.

The process of network infrastructure monitoring often begins with the comprehensive discovery of your network devices. To successfully troubleshoot performance issues, you should monitor the availability of each component connected to your network.

Network infrastructure monitoring can track a variety of on-premises and cloud-based infrastructure components, such as monitoring Cisco devices like Nexus and ASA to help you better understand and ensure network connectivity. You can also monitor a mixture of cloud-based and on-premises infrastructure like load balancers, firewalls, and hardware.

With network infrastructure monitoring tools, network admins can more easily identify the root cause of performance issues within network infrastructures. To detect performance issues, a monitoring solution can help you more easily track device availability, performance metrics, and faults within your infrastructure.

IT infrastructure monitoring tools should allow you to manage on-premises network components alongside cloud services to provide a more holistic view of network performance.

Automated alerts are also a key component of an effective IT infrastructure monitoring solution. To prevent a massive influx of alerts, your monitoring software should allow you to customize alert thresholds to trigger alerts to focus on the issues important to you, such as problems that can lead to poor end-user performance. These real-time alerts can allow you to troubleshoot infrastructure performance issues as soon as they arise.

For network admins, IT infrastructure monitoring tools should provide a comprehensive view of your network devices and their relationships with one another.

A common way to view network infrastructure is by using a network map. However, traditional network maps often lack critical information to help put performance slowdowns in context with network pathing. IT infrastructure monitoring views like NetPath™ can allow you to more easily understand the performance, traffic, and configuration details of devices in your network to more easily identify network issues and resolve slowdowns. Auto-generated network visualizations and interactive displays of devices, applications, networks, and vendors can also help you more quickly understand the network processes that contribute to connectivity issues to the services your end users care about.

A network infrastructure monitoring tool can allow you to prevent downtime and improve the end-user experience more easily by providing you with enhanced visibility of your environment and the relationships between devices.

Other advantages of network infrastructure monitoring tools include:

• Identifying performance issues faster: Determining network issues is a fundamental step in optimizing performance. Network infrastructure tools for monitoring are designed to provide real-time alerts to identify network performance issues and help you perform root cause analysis.
• Streamline troubleshooting: To effectively troubleshoot network infrastructure issues, you need a comprehensive understanding of how your network devices interact with one another. Network infrastructure monitoring software can offer intuitive charts and data visualizations layered with in-depth performance metrics to help you gain deeper visibility of on-premises and cloud-based devices.
• Reduce downtime: When systems are down, profits can also suffer. By better ensuring availability and spending fewer hours trying to identify and resolve performance issues, businesses help maximize their cash flow.
• Improved end-user experience: For network admins, providing a flawless end-user experience is the ultimate hallmark of success. Network infrastructure monitoring can allow you to more easily identify and troubleshoot network device issues before they affect end-user experience.

With such an extensive list of services that can help save time and money, an investment in network infrastructure monitoring software can help you provide better services that can result in bigger savings down the line.

SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) offers a useful bird’s-eye view thanks to its included network infrastructure monitoring tools and features, such as:

• Advanced device monitoring: NPM provides multi-vendor network device monitoring, including specially-designed Network Insight for Cisco ASA, Cisco Nexus, Palo Alto firewalls, and F5 BIG-IP load balancers. 
• Detailed infrastructure monitoring: NPM provides monitoring tools for your on-premises devices and cloud environments for a more comprehensive view of network infrastructure.
• Maps and visualizations: NPM data visualizations can allow network admins to better understand network map and device functions at-a-glance, so you can identify issues quickly and have better control over your network. 

SolarWinds NPM offers a detail-oriented approach to network infrastructure monitoring and is built to be easy to use with intuitive displays, fast configurations, and a wide range of device monitors to allow you to minimize downtime and optimize network performance more easily.