MEENAKSHI SUNDARARAJAN ENGINEERING COLLEGE

#363, Arcot Road, Kodambakkam, Chennai – 600024, Tamil Nadu, India

Department: Computer Science & Engineering Register No.:311521104035

EX. NO : 09 EXPLORE NETWORK MONITORING TOOLS

AIM:

To explore the network monitoring tools.

NETWORK MONITORING:

Network monitoring tools gather and analyze network data to provide network administrators with
information related to the status of network appliances, link saturation, the most active devices, the
structure of network traffic or the sources of network problems and traffic anomalies. Working of Network
monitoring tools: Network monitoring tools collect data in some form from active network devices, such
as routers, switches, load balancers, servers, firewalls, or dedicated probes, which they analyze to paint a
picture of the network’s condition.

Both collection and analysis are equally important functions of network monitoring tools – network
admins need data that is detailed enough for their purposes, and they need comprehensible output.

With this information in hand, network administrators can act with certainty and resolve network problems
hindering business operations due to degraded service or outages.

When using a network monitoring tool, the first step is to determine which network devices should be
monitored and establish performance metrics. Then, decide on a monitoring interval that makes sense for
your situation.

Once in place, network monitoring tools scan for network issues. Methods can be as simple as a ping to
ensure a host Is available. They can also be more extensive, such as monitoring firewall access, bandwidth
usage, resource consumption, uptime, and unexpected changes in network traffic; making sure switches,
routers, servers, firewalls and other endpoints have an acceptable level of throughput; performing load
balancing; and monitoring for high error rates.

These tools offer visualization of the entire network infrastructure with customizable dashboards that
provide real-time performance graphs and other reports showing how the components look and whether
there are unusual parameters that require further investigation.

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 MEENAKSHI SUNDARARAJAN ENGINEERING COLLEGE

#363, Arcot Road, Kodambakkam, Chennai – 600024, Tamil Nadu, India

Department: Computer Science & Engineering Register No.:311521104035

Network monitoring solutions send email or SMS notifications to network administrators when they find
problems needing attention. They also share alert notifications with various IT operational tools, such as
AIOps systems.

Types of network monitoring tools:

There are three primary types of network monitoring tools.

SNMP-based tools use Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) to interact with network
hardware and track the real-time status and use of resources, such as CPU stats, memory

Consumption, bytes transmitted and received, and other metrics. SNMP is one of the most widely used
monitoring protocols, along with Microsoft Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) for Windows
servers and Secure Shell (SSH) for Unix and Linux servers.

Flow-based tools monitors traffic flow to provide statistics about protocols and users. Some also inspect
packet sequences to identify performance issues between two IP addresses. These flow tools capture traffic
flow data and send them to a central collector for processing and storage.

Active network monitoring solutions inject packets into the network and measure end- to-end
reachability, round-trip time, bandwidth, packet loss, link utilization and more. By conducting and
measuring real-time transactions from a user’s perspective, these solutions enable faster and more reliable
detection of outages and performance degradation. There are also both agent and agentless network
monitoring methods.

 Agent-based monitoring involves installing an agent, a small application or piece of software, onto
the monitored device.
 Agent-less monitoring (using SNMP and SSH protocols) requires no installation; instead, network
monitoring software logs directly into the monitored device.

Purpose of Network monitoring tools:

Network failures can lead to business disruptions, which can mean a loss of customers, employee
productivity and money.

Investing in network monitoring software, whether commercial or open-source, means taking a proactive
approach to keeping your network infrastructure healthy and maximizing uptime instead of waiting until
an end user reports network problems. Because infrastructure monitoring lets you know precisely where a
network problem occurs, there’s time for troubleshooting before the situation leads to an outage.

Benefits of network monitoring software:

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 MEENAKSHI SUNDARARAJAN ENGINEERING COLLEGE

#363, Arcot Road, Kodambakkam, Chennai – 600024, Tamil Nadu, India

Department: Computer Science & Engineering Register No.:311521104035

The primary benefit of network monitoring tools is straightforward and easy-to- understand visibility into
an entire network’s connected devices and how data moves between them.

Modern network performance monitoring systems provide baseline information that lets you automatically
compare data and identify any network performance degradation.

An NPM solution requires less time to fix network performance problems. By detecting an issue earlier we
can troubleshoot and fix it much faster, saving time and money.

Network performance monitoring also provides historical data and allows the troubleshooting of past
network problems so you can avoid similar issues in the future. Network monitoring solutions give you
reliable and flexible management tools and capabilities, including pre-configured templates for specific
vendors—such as Cisco, Juniper, Arista and Aruba, among others to ensure working. They help you
comply with industry standards and government regulations.

Monitoring tools can also help you track and benchmark your network’s performance metrics.

Network performance monitoring also lets you keep track of networks that are changing, growing and
becoming more complex over time.

Parameters of a network monitoring tool:

Map Generation:

Network Maps are utilized by the monitoring tools for the ease of visualization of the entire network of an
organization either as a centralized network system or as a distributed network where the maps are divided
according to the logical separations of the network.

Network device discovery further aids the process of map generation by identifying the devices present in
the network.

There are various approaches used for network mapping: route analysis, SNMP based approaches and
active probing.

Network Configuration:

Network configuration is a very important function for precise functioning of the network infrastructure of
any organization.

Administrators ought to be capable of configuring IP addresses of various types of devices along with
other types of configurations like setting up routing protocols for layer 3 devices, updating existing
configuration, adding dynamic manual routes on the fly, etc.

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 MEENAKSHI SUNDARARAJAN ENGINEERING COLLEGE

#363, Arcot Road, Kodambakkam, Chennai – 600024, Tamil Nadu, India

Department: Computer Science & Engineering Register No.:311521104035

Fault Detection And Alerting:

Fault detection include finding, pinpointing and notifying the fault that can occur anywhere in the network.
The fault can be in the device itself which may again be device specific such as a memory segmentation
fault in a router or it can be a common occurrence such as a link failure/node failure.

Alerting encompasses smart alerts that reduces unnecessary network alerts.

Device Discovery:

Device discovery is done using the SNMP protocol. The devices are scanned, added to the database and
imported into the monitoring tool.

Device discovery identifies the type of device along with other details such as the layer in which it works,
average response time, packet loss, operating-system, memory processing power, etc.

Network Traffic Trend Prediction:

It is a proactive approach to ensure the security is not compromised within the network.

Trend prediction is beneficial as it can be used for dynamic bandwidth allocation and network planning.

It also avoids congestion, identify the core links of the network and notify the user so that a high alert can
be placed over that link.

Top 5 network monitoring tools:

SuperOps.ai :

With SuperOps.ai, you get an AI-powered RMM and PSA solution in one tool.

Once deployed, the tool will grant you complete visibility over your clients’ entire asset network. You can
use this to view, track, and manage all of these assets from a single, intuitive dashboard.

Page No.:
 MEENAKSHI SUNDARARAJAN ENGINEERING COLLEGE

#363, Arcot Road, Kodambakkam, Chennai – 600024, Tamil Nadu, India

Department: Computer Science & Engineering Register No.:311521104035

Atera:

Atera is a cloud-based, Remote IT Management platform that provides a powerful and integrated solution,
for MSPs, IT consultants, and IT departments. With Atera you can monitor unlimited devices and
Networks for a flat low rate.

NinjaOne (Formerly NinjaRMM):

With Ninja, you get a complete set of tools to monitor, manage, secure, and improve all of your network
devices, Windows, Mac workstations, laptops, and servers regardless of their location.

Page No.:
 MEENAKSHI SUNDARARAJAN ENGINEERING COLLEGE

#363, Arcot Road, Kodambakkam, Chennai – 600024, Tamil Nadu, India

Department: Computer Science & Engineering Register No.:311521104035

Auvik:

Auvik is a cloud-based solution for network management and monitoring. It is easy to use and helps you
with preventing, detecting, and resolving issues faster. The traffic analysis tools detect anomalies faster. It
provides automated security and performance updates and encrypts network data with AES-256.

SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor:

Page No.:
 MEENAKSHI SUNDARARAJAN ENGINEERING COLLEGE

#363, Arcot Road, Kodambakkam, Chennai – 600024, Tamil Nadu, India

Department: Computer Science & Engineering Register No.:311521104035

SolarWinds provides the Network Performance monitor that can reduce network outages and improve
performance. It is a scalable solution with smarter scalability for large environments.

RESULT:

Thus, the network monitoring tools have been explored successfully.

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