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Why do I need a network performance monitor?
What does a network performance monitor do exactly, and how does it benefit your network?
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4 Answers
The simple reason is because you can't fix a problem that you don't know exists.
Without a quantifiable means of measuring network performance, all you are left with is opinions of what's fast and what's slow, what's working optimally and what's not.
With a Perf Mon, you can establish a performance baseline and then watch your network's performance at peak periods such as first thing in the morning when people login and get their mail, open their apps e.t.c. That way you can see the impact load has on your network performance and plan appropriately for future upgrades and such.
Well-said @Daniel. The biggest benefit is proactively (as Daniel says in his post) finding problems so you can fix them before things get out of hand and making sure your network is performing optimally.
Also, in addition to performance monitoring and network maintenance, a network monitor is also useful for software debugging (verifying protocol implementation) and network troubleshooting.
Right now I'm running LanWatch and watching the traffic zipping by. A burst of syslog messages went by (more than usual) so I stopped the real-time monitoring to examine the packets. With a network monitoring tool you can see if one of your servers is overloaded, check that your routers are configured properly, detect a broadcast storm, etc.
You can also use it to detect or discover an intruder by monitoring traffic outside your own net. (In my LANWatch app I'd set a NOT filter to only see traffic that is not on my internal network, like ip not net 128.1xx.0.0 255.255.0.0) and then watch to see if there's any suspicious packets coming through. For example, you may notice a large number of ARP requests from your Internet router and you can closely examine these packets. You might find someone was trying to circumvent your security system and enter your address space.
The importance of monitoring is the ability to gather historical information of network usage and performance patterns. This collections allows one to establish a baseline (normal performance verses abnormal performance). With this information, you have the ability to become proactive since anything abnormal (above or below the baseline) catches your attention. Investigating performance outside the baseline allows you to act before the network users detect a performance degradation. It is possible to accomplish monitoring with technology or by assigning a network monitoring team (people) to gather the info and watch the performance of a set of network devices.
I hope you choose the technology route. Good luck!
The importance of monitoring is the ability to gather historical information of network usage and performance patterns. This collections allows one to establish a baseline (normal performance verses abnormal performance). With this information, you have the ability to become proactive since anything abnormal (above or below the baseline) catches your attention. Investigating performance outside the baseline allows you to act before the network users detect a performance degradation. It is possible to accomplish monitoring with technology or by assigning a network monitoring team (people) to gather the info and watch the performance of a set of network devices.
I hope you choose the technology route. Good luck!
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