Best practices for Network Monitoring

Effective network monitoring is crucial for maintaining optimal performance, ensuring availability, and securing network configurations. From a network operations center perspective, a device can be monitored in the following ways:

• Availability monitoring: Using ping to check if the device is reachable.
• Availability and performance monitoring: Using SNMP to track device health and performance.
• Traffic monitoring: Using NetFlow, sFlow, J-Flow, Cflow, IPFIX, NetStream, and AppFlow to analyze network traffic patterns.
• Configuration management: Using a network configuration manager (NCM) to back up and manage device configurations.

Before getting started, ensure you have admin privileges on the system where the On-Premise Poller is installed and the system meets the prerequisites, such as CPU, RAM, and processor speed.

When setting up your network monitor, follow the below best practices:

• We recommend adding devices with the hostname instead of the IP if you are in a dynamic IP environment. This ensures the device is monitored continuously, even if the IP changes.
• Configure custom SNMP performance counters to monitor any metric available in your device.
• Receive instant alerts for various parameters by configuring SNMP traps.

When setting up your NetFlow monitor, follow the below best practices:

• We recommend configuring the flow exports through web UI if it is supported on your device. If you know the commands to configure flow exports on your device, you can also configure them directly. This helps you start monitoring your flows more quickly on Site24x7.
• Use application templates to easily classify and visualize the traffic of various applications and services on the network.

When setting up your NCM monitor, follow the below best practices:

• Ensure all the login parameters (like login name, password, and prompt symbols) are correctly set on the credentials for each protocol (SSH, SSH-SCP, SSH-TFTP, Telnet, or Telnet-TFTP) to connect seamlessly to the device.
• Find and use a suitable device template with the correct commands for backing up the configuration. This prevents errors while adding devices to your NCM.

The Upload Configuration option will be available only if supported by the selected protocol (such as SSH-TFTP and SSH-SCP) and the monitor's device template. By integrating these monitoring methods, network administrators can ensure optimal performance, security, and compliance while efficiently managing network devices.