Why Businesses Thrive When they Monitor and Report on Network Performance

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For IT leaders, the need to oversee network activity is imperative. After all, a business network isn’t just a passive operation—it’s an active system of processes that can be analyzed to glean actionable data. Still, far too many organizations aren’t doing nearly enough to be proactive about network oversight, when monitoring and reporting on network performance could be making a world of difference in their day-to-day operations.

Boosting Enterprise Productivity

Nobody can argue with a tool that leads to bolstered productivity, and that's exactly what a networking monitoring solution does. To understand how productivity gains occur, it's best to look at what happens with companies that don't have robust network monitoring. For these businesses, the potential for problems that jeopardize business-critical functions is a lot higher. That's because the vast majority of enterprise problems start very small, but often result in much bigger consequences if they're not identified and dealt with early on. Unfortunately, for companies without strong network monitoring, small issues will almost always metastasize thanks to the lack of network oversight. 

When a small network problem becomes a big one, it's bound to bring enterprise productivity to a screeching halt. Say, for instance, that there’s a backup system within the company network that starts failing to do automated backups. At first, the problem is intermittent, but soon the system fails altogether. For a company without network monitoring, the final failure of this system will likely be the first indication they get that something's wrong—by which time, of course, it’s too late. With the backup system down, the business will then experience a decline in productivity due to the efforts needed to compensate for the issue.

Conversely, a company with network monitoring in place would have been able to identify the sporadic system outages as soon as they arose, preempting any bigger problems. In this way, the business with monitoring wouldn't have to waste any time due to data loss and backup failures, and would therefore be able to complete more productive work.

"Too often, performance of equipment is allowed to degrade to the point where the device is no longer functional or usable," Robert Peretson, founder of Perry Consulting, points out in an MSP Business Management article. Fortunately, this is not a problem for businesses that monitor their networks.

Making Business Management More Cohesive

It is a fundamental misconception to assume that networking somehow belongs in its own silo. And yet this was the mentality that once dictated networking and its oversight, as Vice President of Research and Network Management at Enterprise Management Associates Jim Frey tells TechTarget. But far from being its own silo, network monitoring can—and should—play an integral role in central business functionality. A well-deployed network monitoring solution is one that seamlessly integrates with the rest of the enterprise environment in order to provide actionable insights that can be applied across the business.

"Now we're seeing a shift where networking is bringing with it systems, applications, storage, and other components, providing a more systemic view," Frey says. "Organizations need to see a cross-domain view of operations. If something is broken in one domain, they need to see the problem in another domain." A network monitoring software solution like Intermapper provides exactly this kind of broad oversight. 

Providing Network Oversight with Intermapper

Intermapper is the ultimate tool to give businesses network oversight actionable findings. The basic premise of the tool is that it's a resource that gives you a real-time look into the inner workings of your entire network, down to every individual process. The great virtue of Intermapper is that it merges the specificity of individual hardware, software, and bandwidth management with the broad mapping that gives businesses an overarching picture of their network that they need in order to consistently function at the highest possible level. Here are some of the ways Intermapper works to make businesses better:

Comprehensive Monitoring

Are there thousands of devices in your network? That's the kind of thing that may overwhelm businesses, but it's exactly the kind of thing Intermapper was built to handle. Intermapper functions seamlessly to provide its users with monitoring on all the devices in their network. This is one of the key reasons that over 25,000 network managers place their trust in Intermapper to handle monitoring. 

Real-time Views

Network insight is only actionable if it's delivered in a time-sensitive manner. For instance, if a malfunctioning hard drive isn't discovered until after it's stopped working permanently, then the discovery itself hasn't yielded productive results. But by providing users with real-time views of the active components in their networks, Intermapper ensures that its users will benefit from the kind of timely knowledge that can stop a potential problem in its tracks. Is a network outage about to happen due to a series of server malfunctions at your business' datacenter across the globe? This is the kind of thing you'll be able to determine well in advance with Intermapper.

Alleviation of IT Burden

Without network automation tools, the responsibility to remediate outages, restart services, conduct backups, and more falls on IT workers. These kinds of manual activities open up network oversight to the reality of human error and consume massive amounts of IT workers' time that could be channeled into more constructive, business-critical tasks. When companies take a proactive step with Intermapper, they do their IT departments—and by extension, their business as a whole—a great service.

There's no denying the enterprise-boosting benefits of network monitoring. But when going down this road, it's vital to choose a solution that offers industrial-level strength. From education to government to finance, all businesses can benefit from the time and money savings Intermapper provides, no matter their industry or size. The performance monitoring capabilities of Intermapper give you a real-time view of your network, allowing you to maximize uptime and avoid costly slowdowns or outages. By staying one step ahead of these problems, your business gains the competitive edge it needs to thrive in today’s marketplace.