To ensure 100% system availability, IT department not just need to reduce the problem resolution time, but also needs to prevent problems from occurring. With this kind of tools, network and application administrators are alerted when there are network problems. They can regularly assess the health of their network system and take proactive measures before they facing any fatal crashes.
What is iNetmon?
- iNetmon is a cost effective real time network monitoring solution, to provide continuous monitoring and total visibility across the network, regardless of network topology.
- iNetmon provides you with a complete network monitoring, analysis and visualization tool. It gives you a comprehensive network views ranging from high level application traffic and network connectivity to low level packet details.
- iNetmon simplifies network administrator tasks in general network monitoring, application monitoring, capacity planning, network node discovery, troubleshooting and reporting.
What Is Network Monitoring?
The ability to collect and analyze network traffic known as network monitoring. Most of the intelligent networking devices offer analysis of layer 1 traffic. At this level, the analysis typically focuses on physical network problems such as link status, CRC errors, and framing errors. Dedicated monitoring equipment is often used to analyze layer 2-traffic. Layer 2 and 3 monitoring systems are commonly referred to as "protocol analyzers" because those higher level networking layers rely on special protocols to control the transmission of data. The latest generation of network monitoring products is designed to support very specific applications. For example, some monitoring products are designed to help network administrators identify security threats; some are designed to provide law enforcement officials with tools for real-time surveillance; some are designed to analyze the performance of specific applications; and some are designed to collect raw data for intensive out-of-band analysis. Each of these specializations can yield a focused solution that is designed to address the specific requirements of a vertical market.
Although the proper installation and certification of the structured cabling environment can provide a solid foundation for a maintainable network, administrators also need easy-to-use, cost-effective solutions for the ongoing monitoring of actual traffic conditions. Thus, the need for a proper network monitoring tool is essential to both network administrators and curious users for that matter. Network administrators need tools to simulate worst case or stressed network performance scenarios to assist in network capacity planning. Network administrators generally need more in-depth troubleshooting, traffic monitoring and analysis solutions that can see across the whole spectrum of network activity under actual or simulated operating conditions. Without a sophisticated monitoring solution, network applications and devices can fail without so much as a peep. If that crash occurs over a holiday or weekend, you could be out of business for hours, or possibly days. Worse yet, you might find out from an irate customer.
Why do we need this kind of Monitoring tools?
- Ease deployment of new applications/technologies, where it can analyze the impact of new applications or technologies on the network prior to deployment to avoid potential performance degradation.
- Minimizing downtime and slow time. With faster problem detection, extensive collection of decodes, and intelligent analysis, we can quickly determine the source and the solution of the problems, and finally avoid costly outages.
- Improving response time. Proactively assesses and analyzes network anomalies to help investigate application response time problems and move immediately to corrective actions before network performance is impacted. Recent economic downturn has forced many companies worldwide to downsize their organizations and, as a result, rely more on IT solutions to increase employee productivity. All this has put tremendous pressure on network and application administrators to maintain system uptime. Achieving network and system availability of 99.9%, which is acceptable few years ago, it is no longer acceptable. This 99.9% level of service means that a network would be unavailable for almost 9 hours per year. Based on Infonetics Research data, Network Magazine (7/5/2001) estimated 2% of annual revenue is lost due to network blackouts. On average, one network outage can cost a company US$10,000 to fix. This cost includes network administrator's time, loss of revenue, loss of employee productivity, and loss of goodwill from company stakeholders (suppliers and customers).
- Network management and monitoring tools usually target at 4 types of customers, which is small to medium sized companies with networks of more than 50 computers, large companies that are looking for a fully functional tool that can be economically deployed at multiple sites, software development companies that need to see what they are sending over the network during the development stage, and service providers that maintain third-party LANs/WLANs/WANs.