If your network infrastructure is a crucial asset supporting your company’s business, then you must recognize the importance of taking care of it. An important aspect of this care is monitoring. However, only through understanding the benefits that proper monitoring provides can you define the expectations of your monitoring system in terms of functionalities and its usage. The focus of this blog post is on the benefits that the right monitoring system can provide.
What is Network Monitoring?
Discussing the benefits of network monitoring necessarily implies diverse perspectives on the monitoring landscape we all traverse. Therefore, we've crafted a dedicated blog post as a gateway to this discourse titled “What is Network Monitoring”. However, if your appetite for knowledge remains unsatiated, we further encourage delving into our ebook “Introduction to Network and IT Monitoring for Rookies”.
Benefits of Network Monitoring:
Network monitoring offers numerous benefits and consolidating them into main categories proves to be quite a challenge. However, one benefit stands out as overarching – gaining control over your network. Generic as it may seem, this statement encompasses controlling all aspects, including reliability, availability, planning, cost, efficiency, staff management, reporting, and many others. In the next sections, we will dare to analyze all the benefits that proper monitoring can bring to your organization.
Situation awareness
The primary benefit of well-tuned network monitoring is situation awareness – or simply, visibility over the current health and performance status of your network. This ability is ensured by combining alarms and performance data (which is collected with various network monitoring protocols) overlaid with the network inventory and other relevant information, presented effectively through a variety of dashboards, topology and heatmap, graphs, reports, and other representations.
For comprehensive situation awareness, organizations utilize umbrella systems that encompass all segments of the network: core and access IP/MPLS, transport systems like DWDM, SW-WAN controllers, WiFi networks, mobile networks, etc.
Full situation awareness also requires contextualization of data. This means that each alarm or performance data point is associated with location, contact information, customer details, and the specific service the customer is using, among other parameters. This allows engineers to quickly localize problems, inform affected customers about the situation, and begin coordinating resolution efforts promptly.
Furthermore, with a monitoring system that has full network awareness, another benefit becomes evident. Different alarms can be correlated to generate synthetic alarms and describe the situation with a single alarm instead of many, thus significantly reducing the "noise" created by the network. Moreover, root-cause analysis can pinpoint the underlying problem when multiple alarms are generated.
Performance situation awareness, backed by threshold violation detection, anomaly detection, trending analysis, and forecasting, greatly aids in gaining insights and managing overall network performance. Capacity management and network planning are made possible by utilizing real-world data.
Good resource inventory management
No proper monitoring can be established without a full inventory of the network. This is essential because you need to know what exists within the network to monitor it effectively.
Implementing and maintaining a proper inventory system is a challenging task. Firstly, one must have a robust network inventory system in place - one that can store all key information about active network elements such as device serial and part numbers, hardware and software versions, firmware details, chassis, module and interface data, geographical locations, IP addresses, topologies, and more.
However, having the ability to store information is meaningless without an effective way to manage it. For this purpose, monitoring systems provide a function called network discovery and reconciliation.
Network discovery involves crawling through the network to discover network devices along with all pertinent details, storing this information in temporary data storage. Reconciliation is the process that compares the newly discovered data with the data stored in the network inventory system. It uses various reconciliation policies to update inventory information appropriately.
This approach ensures awareness of all resources in the network and enables effective management of processes such as planning, expansion, replacement, and tracking asset inventory. Moreover, continuous discovery detects all changes in the network, aiding in verifying whether change management processes are accurately reflected in the inventory or if there have been any unauthorized inventory changes, thereby enhancing overall security.
Availability and reliability maximized
As the monitoring system reports any faulty conditions in the network in near real-time, it allows for prompt reactions to situations, thereby reducing response time. This is further enhanced by using alarm correlation and root cause analysis. However, fixing problems quickly is equally important, and for this purpose, monitoring provides a set of tools that expedite problem resolution.
One such set of tools includes diagnostic scripts that reduce the time needed to provide more detailed analysis of the situation. Furthermore, automation can be employed to address well-known problems that require predefined remediation actions.
However, in some cases, engineer expertise is necessary to resolve the issue, and monitoring systems offer numerous tools to help engineers accurately pinpoint the problem and apply the appropriate fix. For example, network topologies enriched with alarms and performance data are commonly used to detect issues. Additionally, engineers can activate external remediation scripts directly from the monitoring system to expedite the application of the proper remedy.
All these methods reduce total downtime, thereby improving reliability and availability. However, the described activities are reactive. Modern monitoring systems aim to provide means for proactive action—to take measures that prevent outages or performance degradations.
One such example is continuous analysis of incoming events and detecting patterns that can indicate future faults. This helps engineers take preemptive actions—to fix the problem before it impacts the health or performance of the network. This approach also improves overall reliability and availability.
Other methods of proactive action involve performance analysis, which leads us to the next significant benefit described in the following section.
Utilization and capacity management
There are many preemptive activities taken to improve the availability of the network. One of the most important activities is related to forecasting and capacity planning. Forecasting performance metrics provides upfront information to engineers, alerting them to potential future problems. For instance, a consistent increase in CPU or memory usage, or link utilization, can be detected, allowing engineers to take necessary measures before utilization reaches critical levels and thresholds are violated.
Additionally, systematic performance management and forecasting serve as the foundation for capacity planning practices. Capacity planning aims to provide input for network capacity management, seeking to avoid any future performance degradation that might lead to network outages. These practices are directly concerned with network availability and reliability.
Anomaly and threat detection
Monitoring systems establish the baseline behavior of relevant performance metrics for many types of network monitoring. Any significant deviation from this "usual" behavior is considered an anomaly.
An anomaly may indicate several things. It could signify abrupt behavior by network end-customers. For example, a major media event like a royal wedding might cause unusual network behavior. Alarms triggered when such anomalies are detected can help engineers better understand what is happening and take necessary actions to improve the network's behavior.
Network flow monitoring is used to observe the behavior of specific customers or network services. Detecting anomalies in this segment indicates a change in customer behavior. A specific pattern of anomaly can suggest malicious behavior caused by viruses, trojans, malware, or other cyber threats.
Performance data anomalies are also used to detect various types of DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks.
Notifications and reporting
Generating an alarm for a faulty condition in the network is one thing, but alerting an engineer and ensuring action is taken is another critical aspect of monitoring. For this purpose, monitoring systems employ notification systems. Notifications ensure that if no action is taken within a predefined timeframe after an alarm, some form of notification will be issued. This could include sounding an alarm in the Network Operations Center (NOC), sending an email to an engineer, or automatically placing a call to their mobile phone. The notification system also handles escalation. If no action is taken at the initial level, the monitoring system will automatically notify another engineer, such as the NOC team leader, and if still no action is taken, further levels of escalation will be activated.
The overall performance of network management operations must be regularly reported to senior management. This task can be tedious and time-consuming. To streamline this process, monitoring systems employ reporting engines that automatically generate scheduled or on-demand operational and management reports, significantly saving time for NOC engineers.
Optimization of operational costs
One of the important aspects of a proper monitoring system is its impact on operational cost savings. This is observed in multiple aspects. Firstly, fault remediation automation, root-cause analysis, synthetic alarms, contextualization of alarm and performance data, reporting, and other actions all free up time for network engineers. Therefore, available engineering resources can be redirected towards more advanced functions.
Capacity management allows for the minimization of the cost of network expansion, directly saving money.
However, one of the most significant effects is the reduction of network downtime and improved end customer satisfaction. This effect has a large impact on overall confidence in enterprise IT and indicates that the investment pays off. In the case of telecom networks, the promoter score of the telecom improves, allowing for churn reduction and better customer acquisition, directly impacting the telecom's revenue and improving Return on Investment (ROI).
Support to SLA and regulatory compliance management
The monitoring system plays an important role in supporting two critical aspects of every organization's activities: SLA management and regulatory compliance.
SLA monitoring involves comparing various performance metrics, including total uptime, against limits established in Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Specifically, performance metrics managed by the monitoring system are used to verify if Service Level Objectives (SLOs) are being met. However, it's important to note that the monitoring system may not be the ideal place to manage SLAs. The ideal system for managing SLAs is the ticketing system because it has awareness of all customer interactions. When supplied with metrics from the monitoring system and SLA definitions, the ticketing system can provide proper SLA management.
On the other hand, many large organizations face the challenge of complying with regulations such as PCI-DSS, SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley), and others. All such regulations require data from monitoring systems. For example, events recorded by monitoring systems are often used for central log management and satisfy common regulatory requirements to store, analyze, and monitor such logs.
UMBOSS's implementation of best practices
UMBOSS is an umbrella assurance system specifically designed to deliver all the benefits discussed in the previous chapter. Its umbrella Event and Fault Management module provides consolidated and contextualized alarming, root-cause analysis, cross-domain correlation, notifications, and other advanced functions to help engineers efficiently manage the network. The Performance Management module allows for metric baselining, threshold violation alarming, anomaly detection, forecasting, and supports capacity management. The Automation module enables automated actions triggered by alarms or manually from the UMBOSS Portal. Reporting functions are used to generate operational and management reports, saving time for other activities.
UMBOSS also features an automatic network discovery and reconciliation engine, along with its own inventory systems, which help ensure the accuracy and proper management of existing network resources.
Need more help in the area of network monitoring best practices? Send us your questions or schedule a demo to see UMBOSS in action.
