A typical corporate environment can greatly benefit from having a good network monitoring solution in place. It helps increase employee productivity, saves you money on network performance, and allows for swift detection and troubleshooting of network-related issues. Whether the network is wired or wireless, a good network monitoring solution will help you keep things moving smoothly and point out what can be fixed or upgraded. Let’s look at some of the other things it can do for you:

Easily see detect when the network is down

With the help of networking monitoring from ipswitch and similar solutions, you can not only get notified when there are any problems with the network, but also pinpoint the exact location of them. This is possible by graphically mapping the entire network, where working elements of it are colored green, and non-working ones are marked with the red colors. Simple and easy.

Measure performance

These network monitoring solutions also help you keep track of resources such as processor and memory usage. This comes in handy when something is clogging up the network and you can’t quite put your finger on it.

Read through event logs

By being able to read through event logs, it’s easier to get to the bottom of things. This allows you to determine who logged in from where and what actions this particular individual performed during that time (in chronological order).

Whether it’s performance or security related, having the ability to make a connection between certain network events and the actions that users performed can help speed up the investigation and highlight any oddities such as multiple failed logins, file tampering, etc.

Design customized alerts

Checking for when the network is down is the most basic thing you can do with software like this. However, there are other events you can check for, and every change of state is a trigger you can tie a custom messaging service to (for example, when another machine joins or leaves the network). You can even set a custom message of your choosing sent through a variety of means like SMS services, email, etc.

Group users based on various parameters

A network consists not only of devices, but of users who manage and interact with them as well. A network monitoring solution lets you group them based on parameters you choose, such as an IP address or location. This is especially important when trying to make sense of what’s going on in a larger, corporate network; while you could probably do this manually, it would take way too much time and effort (plus, live status updates wouldn’t be included).

Customize network settings and restore backups

If you come to the conclusion that previous settings worked better than the current ones, a good network monitoring solution automatically keeps track of them for you and lets you restore them from a backup. Having this option available also helps you stay compliant with various government regulations (PCI DSS, SXOX, FISMA, and others).

Conclusion

The benefits listed above are only the beginning of what you can do with the help of network monitoring solutions. The larger the network, the harder it gets to manage it, so software like this truly makes matters much less complicated. Since the amount of time it helps you save is quite apparent, have you already considered investing in it?