What is Network Monitor for?

Network equipment failures can cause grave consequences, such as material and data looses, bad relations with your customers, etc. System administrators should monitor their networks constantly, detect all the failures that can occur on all network devices (local computers, servers, switches, network printers and others) in time, and recover them as fast as possible. That is why the network monitoring is vital in modern IT infrastructure.

With a network monitor, the administrator can solve the uptime problem effortlessly. The network monitor application is to be installed on the administrator’s computer or a server and should operate 24 hours 7 days a week. The monitoring process should run remotely via a network.

A good network monitoring program should contain a wide set of checks that allow the administrator to be notified about any network failures. The network monitor should help you to check the state of any device or server in your network. This can be done via the ICMP ping, TCP port monitoring, the ARP, SNMP, DNS, FTP, and HTTP protocol monitoring. These checks allow you to monitor a wide variety of network hosts and devices. The monitoring program should notify you when a device or server goes down automatically. Thanks to this fact, you can react to any problem quickly and recover all failures in time.

The network monitoring program can help detecting malicious software on computers in time. The administrator can monitor opened TCP ports via the TCP protocol. Having the list of TCP ports that are frequently used by such applications (the lists can be found on the Internet), you can configure several checks to monitor those opened ports. If the application detects any of the specified TCP ports has opened, it should notify you of that. You can also monitor processes running on remote computers and detect danger applications using this way if the network monitor can check remote processes for existence. In this case, you will need to have names of danger processes and configure the monitoring on remote computers.

Using the same process monitoring check, the administrator can control users' activities on the network. He can be notified when they launch certain applications, such as games, media players, etc. during the working hours.

Some network monitors also allow you to monitor the size of files and folders. Sometimes, application logs increase and occupy too much space on the hard drive of a computer or server. The further log file or temporary folder size increasing can eat all the free disk space and block the workstation or server. The file size monitoring allows you to control the specified file or folder size. You will be warned if the file size reaches the specified volume. The free space on your disks can also be monitored.

The most advanced network monitors allow you to monitor MAC address changes. This feature can help protecting your network from unauthorized connections and highly recommended for use.

The network monitor should be able to warn an administrator about particular events in different ways. These include: displaying a message, sending an e-mail message, playing a sound, sending SMS to a mobile phone, executing VB and JS scripts. All the monitoring check results can be recorded to the network monitor application log for future analyzing.

Moreover, the administrator should be able to configure the network monitor to run particular programs in response to monitoring events. The monitoring program can run external applications, restart/shut down a service or a remote computer.

The network monitoring (which includes controlling hosts, searching slow and defective systems, finding bottlenecks) is one of the most important functions of a network administrator. The whole successful operation of a company depends on how this problem is solved. A good network monitor can make this process more effective and simpler.