Let’s talk about network monitoring tools. IT service management (ITSM) relies heavily on efficient network performance to deliver reliable services to end-users. Therefore, networks must be continuously monitored to ensure stability, detect issues early, and prevent disruptions to critical operations. Without robust network monitoring, ITSM teams and their organizations face the risk of undetected bottlenecks, outages, or security vulnerabilities, all of which can result in downtime, reduced productivity, and financial loss.
Network monitoring tools
Modern network monitoring tools are essential for providing ITSM professionals real-time visibility into their IT infrastructure. These tools automate the process of tracking devices, applications, and network traffic, allowing IT administrators to quickly identify and resolve issues. They also support proactive maintenance by providing insights into performance trends and capacity planning, ensuring the network is prepared for growing demands.
In this article, I describe the features and capabilities of three popular network monitoring solutions:
- Device42, which excels in automated network device discovery with agentless scanning and artificial intelligence (AI)-enhanced data enrichment for lifecycle management.
- PRTG Network Monitor, which provides extensive integration options and visual dashboards, making it a flexible tool for detailed traffic analysis and real-time alerts.
- SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor, which offers advanced mapping, customizable metrics, and a robust alert engine to monitor performance across complex, multi-vendor environments.
Network Monitoring Tools: What Is Device42?
Device42 offers a suite of agentless device discovery tools to automatically map IT network infrastructure. It also supports network mapping through API queries. These tools work quietly in the background to collect inventory data from physical, cloud, and other virtual assets to update the Device42 configuration management database (CMDB).
Device42 uses protocols like SNMP and SSH along with cloud APIs to collect data. It uses the least privileged account, such as SNMP read community string access, to ensure security. Its architecture comprises remote collectors that perform discovery across segregated environments without the need for open ports. While discovery is agentless by default, an agent is available to scan remote devices requiring higher security.
Device42 Key Features
The main features of Device42 include:
- Network device discovery: Ensures the stability of networks by providing visibility of all networking devices and equipment, enabled by a comprehensive inventory. It offers insights into switches, routers, firewalls, load balancers, servers, printers, and fiber switches.
- EnrichAI: Enriches network data with AI and third-party data to help normalize it and extract actionable insights. It makes managing the operating system and software lifecycle easier, helping avoid end-of-life and end-of-support challenges.
- Scheduling and updating: Offers a flexible synchronization schedule for network discovery. Users can configure jobs to run on custom schedules based on weekly, daily, hourly, or other specified times. It supports discovering IPs (hostnames), IP ranges, cloud accounts, and subnets.
Network Monitoring Tools: What Is PRTG Network Monitor?
Paessler Router Traffic Grapher (PRTG) Network Monitor is a software tool for monitoring networks. It can run on Windows machines inside an enterprise network, collecting statistics from various types of specified hosts. Sources of these statistics include servers, routers, switches, applications, and other devices. RPTG is available for free for organizations that track under 25 devices.
Network management software is important for detecting network issues before they affect performance or cause major security risks. Solutions like PRTG help network admins to manage these issues by sending alerts, helping them avoid expensive outages, and ensure services remain functional.
Key Features of PRTG Network Monitor
PRTG offers several important features for network monitoring:
- Integration support: Supports integrating various technologies to ensure monitoring across the organization’s infrastructure. These include SNMP, WMI, SSH, HTTP requests, REST APIs (returning JSONPing and XML), Ping, and SQL. It also enables traffic analysis through packet sniffing and flow protocols.
- Maps and dashboards: Visualizes the network through live-status maps. Admins can set up dashboards using PRTG’s map designer. These dashboards can integrate all network parts, supporting over 300 map objects like icons for devices and statuses, top lists, and traffic charts. Maps can be customized using HTML and shared as privately or publicly accessible URLs.
- Flexible alerts: Alerts users when abnormal metrics or potential issues are detected. Several built-in notification mechanisms exist, including email, HTTP requests, and push notifications. There are free applications for iOS and Android systems to deliver notifications to user devices. Alerting schedules and dependencies can be used to prevent alert fatigue.
Network Monitoring Tools: What Is SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor?
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) provides several capabilities to help administrators monitor networks. It automatically identifies network paths and nodes using protocols such as ICMP, WMI, and SNMP, providing an overview of different vendors and devices. It includes a Quality of Experience dashboard, configurable alerts, and reporting features.
IT admins can use NPM to investigate details about the nodes they monitor, tracking KPIs (key performance indicators) through customizable graphs and charts. NPM includes several network monitoring tools, including a network mapping feature, an SNMP and syslog trap server, and a network device poller. See this blog post for a comparison of SolarWinds and PRTG Network Monitor.
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor Key Features
SolarWinds NPM offers the following features for network monitoring:
- Device discovery: Makes it easier to perform monitoring across global networks by automatically discovering network devices, prompting users to monitor the nodes it discovers. It provides performance metrics for components like clients, autonomous access points, and wireless controllers.
- Customizable metrics and analysis: Admins can track and view their chosen network metrics with configurable graphs and drag-and-drop charts. For example, cross-stack data correlation can be used to identify the issue’s root causes across visual timelines. Groups and dependencies can be configured based on the network environment.
- Mapping and alerting options: Automatically updates network maps to provide additional context. Admins can use the NetPath feature to monitor and analyze services and network infrastructure. Maps can be set up at the device or global level to track network traffic across applications. The alert engine offers 16 notification delivery options with customizable triggers.
ITSM professionals require network monitoring tools to enable visibility and management of an organization’s network infrastructure. Various platforms offer different levels of monitoring coverage, customizability, and scalability at different price points. The three solutions mentioned in this article – Device42, PRTG, and SolarWinds – are among the most popular options for monitoring networks, and each emphasizes different organizational needs.
Further Reading
Gilad Maayan
Gilad is a technology writer who has worked with over 150 technology companies including SAP, Oracle, Zend, CheckPoint and Ixia, producing technical and thought leadership content that elucidates technical solutions for developers and IT leadership.
