9 Key Network Monitoring System Principles

Just recently, I stumbled upon an interesting

Article by Shamus McGillicuddy titled: “Essential network monitoring system features for the enterprise”

Which caught my attention when I was researching as to how independent experts look at the core monitoring principles.

Shamus’s great article touches on very important aspects of availability monitoring solutions. I fully agree that deployment model, ease of use, compatibility with existing network infrastructure, system scalability and interoperability are among key aspects of any monitoring solution.

As a matter of fact, we have built our BIG-IP monitoring solution around exactly the same principles.

1. Licensing model:
   Our licencing model is per device with no limitation on device load (i.e. number of virtual servers), we designed our installation and configuration process to make this process as easy as possible and we are providing detailed action-validation oriented deployment guide for excellent deployment model praised by our customers.
2. Ease of use:
   For SCOM admins, our solution is extremely easy to use as we used only standard elements of SCOM and best practices when we designed our product user experience.
3. Compatibility with existing infrastructure:
   While compatibility with existing network infrastructure is important, we benefit from the SCOM monitoring platform built-in capabilities to provide extended monitoring of more than 800 network device types from more than 50 vendors. With SCOM 2016 open model it’s simple to add SNMP based monitoring for even more devices, either by vendors or independent developers.
4. Application delivery:
   Our product is monitoring critical component of application delivery and for us it’s also important that there is more than 7,000 SCOM management packs available providing a single monitoring platform from network devices to complex software systems such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM or IBM WebSphere Application Server.
5. Scalability:
   As our solution is a perfect fit for even the largest companies, we made extreme optimizations to our solutions. Using no more than standard monitoring server configuration, we are able to monitor 150+ devices environment with no more than 3 servers (to be honest, we can do it with 2, but if one fails, the load on remaining one will be just too much to handle) and with built in SCOM scalability features we are able to provide almost linear scalability.
6. Interoperability:
   For the interoperability aspect, we utilize SCOM integrations to export monitoring events and collected context to other IT systems such as ticketing solutions.
7. Focus:
   One extremely important aspect everybody should be aware of is focus on only important events. The core logic of monitoring is that monitoring is a trigger for immediate management actions. Collecting too much information is not helping, as it only generates noise which can hide important events.
8. Built-in knowledge:
   Monitoring solutions must have built in knowledge, built on experience and collected from customer base, to extract only those events requiring your immediate attention, and as speed is new black, all the necessary context to help you shorten a root cause identification.
9. Security:
   I like that Shamus identified network availability monitoring systems as first line of defence for applications availability and we believe that network monitoring solutions must also be part of security infrastructure in any organization. Collecting and visualising performance data, especially from security appliances, is helping security teams analiyse threats and fine-tune systems for optimal protection. Our solution is collecting data from BIG-IP ASM module to provide:

• Cross team awareness of attack in progress
• Easy sharing of Cyber-attacks details with security team
• Detailed investigation of ASM policy configuration and effects

It was great to see that we are on the right track and that independent experts recognize exactly the same principles we used to design and build our solution. Jump in and see our product in action! You can start free evaluation (free support included) or you can just ask for product demo.