A major challenge of today’s IT landscape lies in supporting computing devices from multiple vendors that address many different requirements. Essentially, the increased complexity and quantity of today’s computing infrastructure has made it virtually impossible to monitor your network manually; you need a robust network monitoring solution to perform that task. While there are many factors to consider when selecting a network monitoring software, ease-of-use and cost effectiveness are among the most critical.
Network monitoring is supposed to make managing network operations easier, not increase the stress and complexity of your day to day operations. When evaluating your network monitoring options, it’s important to determine its ease-of-use for several reasons.
Empowers Network Administrators
As a busy network administrator, you should feel confident that your network monitoring solution is powerful while still being easy to use. You should not have to spend copious amounts of time on the training and deployment of your software for it to begin effectively monitoring your network. Instead, it should empower you to spend more time tackling strategic tasks and offer peace of mind that the tool you have in place will watch your network when you can’t be on premise, alerting you of potential issues wherever you are.
Lowers Expenses
IT budgets have been on the rise for some of the larger software and hardware vendors, such as Hewlett Packard, IBM, and Cisco, who have built their own proprietary monitoring solutions. Although these are capable, enterprise-level solutions, they are also extremely expensive.
The point of implementing a network monitoring software in the first place is to save your organization time and money. Monitoring technology has the potential to reduce staff or even let you run “lights out,” saving entire salaries and minimizing overtime costs. Plus, it can reduce network downtime, which can save financial organizations millions of dollars if high-stakes trades are on the line.
You should not have to hire additional staff or a team of consultants to deploy your new software, which would counteract the savings you were hoping to achieve in the first place. Looking at the other side of the spectrum, freeware products such as Nagios or Spiceworks come with additional caveats, requiring you to provide a fair amount of development to make the application perform the way you want it to.
A comprehensive network mapping and monitoring software solution like Intermapper can provide you with the best of both worlds, supporting enterprise-level organizations while still being easy to navigate and administer. What’s more, Intermapper is extremely affordable and comes with great support and a full-fledged user community.
In general, you should be wary of certain shareware solutions that claim to require extensive time and effort to set up and maintain. Self-sufficient technology reduces, rather than adds to, headcount.
Helps Quickly Pinpoint Problems
You should consider a network monitoring solution that provides you with an at-a-glance view of your network in real time, so you can visually see the current state of your network components. It would be contradictory to implement a network monitoring system that you had to spend hours analyzing and attempting to demystify. With a solid network monitoring solution in place, you should have all the information you need at a glance.
Allows for Easy Trend Analysis
The right network monitoring software should allow you to easily disseminate critical information. Web-based analytics can help identify short-and long-term patterns in order to quickly and easily diagnose network problems. If possible, the network monitoring software should also have status windows that display current operating data as well as strip charts that present graphs of historical performance. Just as a network administrator needs to see real-time network statistics at a glance, so, too, does he or she need to easily analyze historical trends to better troubleshoot issues in the future.
Aids Communication with Upper Management
A network monitoring software should allow you to easily relay information to upper management in order to procure the funding you need to make sure your network is healthy. It should be painless to explain to someone who’s not an IT professional—say, your CIO or CEO.
No Messy Agent Deployments
The majority of monitoring solutions provide agent installs that must be distributed to end devices to capture data. At times, these agents can utilize your bandwidth by communicating back to the monitoring station. A more effective solution to reaching devices on your network is utilizing Simple Network Management Protocol that is supported by most systems. This protocol requires little maintenance and captures data very quietly and efficiently on your network.
The right network monitoring solution, such as Intermapper, can offer:
- Rapid, easy implementation and management
- Graphical view of your network topology
- Vendor-agnostic device support
- Real-time monitoring
- Reduced overall investment when compared to traditional solutions
- Strong industry standards basis
- Simple licensing
- Elimination of heavy agents
- Smart alerting
Intermapper: Easy to Use, Affordable, and Effective
Of course you want software that is not only easy to use, but powerful. That’s where Intermapper steps in. Intermapper is an industrial strength network mapping, monitoring, and alerting software that comes with 64-bit support: proving that a network monitoring solution can be affordable, easy to use, yet immensely effective.
Intermapper was designed to help network administrators maintain peak network performance. It has the power to auto-discover every IP-enabled device in your network using its built-in scanning engine. Intermapper collects data from all equipment being monitored and compares the collected data to thresholds to alert you to new problems.
Intermapper provides you with the insight and intelligent information needed to easily identify congestion and chart issues for trending information. Charting data can be invaluable in determining if the issue is a short-term obstruction or a long-term problem, causing packet loss or latency, a result of excessive traffic, or causing slowdowns. With Intermapper, it’s easy to visually display faults in your network and show upper management why you need the budget to fix them. Intermapper is truly affordable while still easy to deploy, integrate, and operate. To learn more about Intermapper, start your free 30-day trial today.
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