Difference between Network Monitoring and Network Security Monitoring
It seems like every other day; we hear about another company that has been hacked and its customers’ personal data compromised. In the wake of these incidents, it’s more important than ever for businesses to take steps to protect themselves from cyber-attacks. One way to do this is by implementing a network monitoring and security monitoring solution.
Network monitoring allows you to keep track of all activity on your network, so you can quickly identify and respond to any suspicious behaviour. Security monitoring helps you detect and prevent malware and other threats from entering your network. Implementing both of these solutions can help keep your business safe from cyberattacks.
Network monitoring allows you to keep track of all activity on your network, so you can quickly identify and respond to any suspicious behaviour. Security monitoring helps you detect and prevent malware and other threats from entering your network. Implementing both of these solutions can help keep your business safe from cyberattacks.
What is network monitoring?
Network monitoring is an IT process that monitors endpoints and servers within a network infrastructure to provide fault, performance and traffic insights. It allows the network administrators to detect critical network issues, faults, and unavailability of network components and reduce the overall downtime.
The network monitoring system also allows the network administrator to monitor bandwidth utilisation and reduce network congestion to improve overall network performance within the infrastructure. It allows the remote availability monitoring of assets and sending of alert notifications via email to responsible personnel.
Why is network monitoring important?
Let’s take a look at why performing network monitoring is of paramount importance for any organisation.
Rapid fault resolution
Service downtime causes both financial and reputational loss for any digital business. When an organisation faces downtime, the network professionals are under severe pressure to resolve the issue quickly and get the monitoring service up and running in the least possible time.
Network monitoring allows the network professionals to identify the root cause whether it is a misconfiguration, traffic congestion or interface link down.
Focusing on critical operations
Thanks to network monitoring systems that deliver immediate pre-built dashboards, the network professionals no longer have to waste time by manually digging into performance artefacts. Instead, they can focus on more critical and creative projects that improve the overall process and infrastructure in the long run.
Troubleshooting a network issue manually consumes a significant amount of time and energy of a network professional and since network monitoring tools make inference of the issue relatively very simple, that energy and time can be spent in completing other projects.
Managing and scaling to bigger networks
The number of connected devices to the internet has rapidly increased in the past years and is projected to reach 30.0 billion by the year 2025. Whether these devices are computers, mobiles, microcontrollers or sensors, monitoring traffic of each is of equal importance for an organisation.
Networks have also grown in the context of complexity. Many organisations have server monitoring deployed on cloud networks that communicate with their on-premises devices. Many have VPN tunnels with their partner organisations. And almost all of them have remote access for their employees.
In order to ensure the availability of all these services, all components must be proactively monitored.
Prevent network outages
Network outages can occur due to many reasons like configuration errors, increasing complexity of technology etc. To prevent these outages from happening frequently, network monitoring must be implemented as it allows organisations to stay one step ahead of potential network issues by monitoring network interfaces for traffic congestion.
Network Monitoring tools
To monitor the network, certain network monitoring tools exist in the market that are compared to each other based on their features. This section will discuss features and tools that are essential for monitoring the network.
Key features of a network monitoring tool
Live performance analytics
Network monitoring tools must be able to monitor changes in the network and the performance of network devices in real time. If the performance analytics are not timely recorded, the health status of network devices and bandwidth statistics can not be monitored proactively.
In order to avoid downtime, network monitoring systems should record and display performance analytics as soon as they occur.
Automated asset discovery
Without knowing every single network device within a network, network professionals cannot completely monitor the network parameters and ensure the best performance. A good network monitoring system continuously looks out for new network devices and endpoints on the network, saving the network analyst the effort of manual discovery.
Informative alerting mechanisms
If the job of a network monitoring system can be divided into two parts, and one part is discovering performance issues, then the other part would definitely be alerting the network professionals of these issues.
Network monitoring systems should issue real-time alerts to relevant network engineer resources to take the necessary steps to remediate the issue. These alerts should include information such as source network device, severity, and detail of the security incident.
Issue diagnosis and root cause analysis
A good network monitoring tool provides real-time performance metrics within enterprise networks and identifies network connection issues and drills down their root causes. This allows network engineers to focus on creative projects in order to enhance the performance of their enterprise networks.
Here are the five most well-known network monitoring solutions.
