Network Monitoring and Visibility
Network monitoring tools continuously collect and analyze network traffic. When done right, they provide admins with network visibility and useful insights that they can instantly act upon.
Launch demoWhat does a network monitoring tool do?
Network monitoring is vital for the smooth running of company networks. Good network visibility helps administrators and security professionals to tackle network performance issues, identify faulty services or assets, allocate bandwidth capacity, detect anomalies, and protect the infrastructure from threats such as malware, data leaks, or other dangers.
There are multiple approaches that network monitoring tools take to deliver the required insights.
How do network monitoring tools work?
SNMP
In the past, infrastructure monitoring with SNMP polling was enough to ensure an acceptable level of visibility. But today, with increasingly complex network architectures and emphasis on performance, administrators need to see beyond mere infrastructure availability.
Full packet capture
Some network traffic monitoring solutions leverage full-packet analysis. While it can deliver a very high level of detail, the network bandwidths of 10 Gbps or more which are common today mean that storage and rack space requirements would be enormous.
Flow data
For better scalability and more coverage via a single solution, network admins turn to IPFIX, which provides relevant information from L2-L7 of network traffic, and only reserve the storage-consuming packet capture for special situations.
What are the benefits of using an IP monitoring software?
Network monitoring tools save hours of tedious network troubleshooting, allowing network and security teams to focus on IT projects and innovation instead.
By monitoring network traffic in real-time, you cover use cases as:
- Real-time network traffic monitoring of individual devices
- Checking the availability and performance of mission-critical services
- Identification of operational and configuration issues
- Enforcement of company policies and SLAs
- Quick troubleshooting and ticket resolution
What does Flowmon do?
Enriched data generation
Flowmon processes network telemetry data including IP flows and raw packets, which it collects from a variety of network devices. Dedicated proprietary sensors called Flowmon Probes can be used to improve performance, increase data granularity, and enrich the flow data with L7-information.
Analysis and data retention
Flowmon stores and analyzes this data in the Flowmon Collector. The Collector is the central console that houses the analytical engine, takes care of visualization and reporting, and can be extended with many advanced functions for enhanced analytics and automation.
By leveraging enriched network telemetry, Flowmon provides visibility that enables you to resolve 95% of network issues including incidents like:
- Hand-held scanners in a logistic center that aren’t communicating with servers and stalling logistic operations.
- Servers using outdated certificates and weak encryption algorithms.
- Long incident resolution time caused by poor documentation and lack of knowledge of network devices and services.
- Lack of visibility into network traffic structure that is stalling firewall configuration due to difficulty discerning legitimate traffic from the unwanted.
- A faulty server hogging the bandwidth due to incorrect configuration, causing employees complain about slow connection.
- Private and company-owned devices are difficult to manage and secure due to lack of control.
Data visualization
Flowmon is designed for maximum utility, with predefined customizable dashboards and simple drilldown from top-level statistics to network-level data. All information is stored for weeks to months with zero aggregation to enable retrospective analysis.
Fully customizable dashboard with tabs for various user roles
Monitoring cloud and hybrid environments
Monitoring tools offered by public cloud providers are indeed helpful, but they also create a monitoring gap and cause toolset fragmentation because most network monitoring tools are designed to be deployed in local networks.
Flowmon Collector is designed to work in both cloud and hybrid environments. It provides a uniform level of visibility on premises and in the cloud indifferently. In addition, it presents insights from both environments in one UI, and thus eliminates the swivel-chair management of using several dedicated tools.
Learn how Flowmon works in the cloud and how it can help monitor SaaS applications
