Key Considerations for Your Network Monitoring Strategy During COVID-19

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, your business has seen a lot of changes. Companies are taking smart safety precautions, which in most cases, has led to an increase in working from home. Since the beginning of April, a new MIT report says that 34% of Americans have already traded in their commute for remote work. And analysts predict companies will be opting for remote work in some capacity for the foreseeable future.

While we all hope to be back together in our offices soon, this may be the way we work for a while. Which means an increase of stress on your network infrastructure—and your IT department. Now is an important time to ensure you have a solid network monitoring strategy. A network monitoring solution, like Intermapper from Fortra, can help alleviate that stress by helping you keep your network running at optimal levels.

Here are some key things to consider as you think about your network monitoring strategy during these challenging times—and beyond.

Keep Your Network Monitoring Software Simple

Think through your current network needs to determine the features and functionality that will keep your network healthy. Right now you need mapping capabilities, automatic device detection, and remote access to monitor your network from home. Some solutions might push you to purchase additional modules to support features you might not need for your business. Ask yourself: will you utilize everything you’re paying for? Step away from complex solutions that make you pay for features you won’t use.

Instead, consider a comprehensive solution that supports the most critical network monitoring features and capabilities without the overly complex architecture. Intermapper lets you map and monitor anything with an IP address, through SNMP and other protocols, to give you an end-to-end look at your business. The Intermapper console comes with a full feature set so you don’t have to pay for each piece of functionality.

Stretch Your Budget with Important Cost Savings

To help meet the demands of a volatile economy, companies are having to get creative with their budgets. Purchases are approved on a need-to-have basis. Network monitoring software should be considered a need-to-have tool for how it can help you prepare your network for unexpected times. But to help stretch your budget further, it’s best to understand how different vendors license their products as you compare solutions.

Some vendors may make you buy a license for every element or sensor you plan to monitor which can quickly drive up costs. Intermapper provides clear, device-based pricing, starting with 10 devices all the way to unlimited, making it easy for you to scale with your ever-changing environment. With a subscription-based purchase option, this low cost of entry makes it an ideal solution for organizations looking to optimize costs and see quick ROI.

Optimization of Resources

In these stressful times, resources are being stretched thin. Whether due to unfortunate circumstances like furloughs, layoffs, or leaves of absence to care for someone sick, your IT team may look different right now. In this all-hands-on-deck moment, you need a solution that can help you run effectively and efficiently to meet the demands of your daily network activity. Consider solutions that are easy to install, easy to deploy, and easy to use, so you can get up and running quickly.

Network monitoring solutions are designed to help lighten the load of your IT team. By monitoring the network for you, your team can focus on other critical needs. Flexible notifications can alert your team when performance thresholds have been exceeded or when a device goes down. Take that a step further with Intermapper. It lets you map your environment faster with auto-discovery, offers remote access so geographically-scattered teams can share monitoring access, as well as a network automation tool to help cut your remediation time from hours to minutes.

Meet the unique challenges of these times and prepare for the new normal by implementing a solution that can map and monitor all your devices. Network monitoring helps you determine what “normal” looks like for your network, so you can keep everything running as it should. In addition to these strategies, a good network monitoring solution can keep a close eye on network bandwidth and traffic flow, help you monitor your network from home, and take the burden off your IT team by offloading common network alerts to automation.