Networking Blog

Posts Tagged ‘monitoring’

Remember the old days when networks typically were in one location, used plain old servers and routers, and were homogeneous in nature? In those days, a network monitoring system could take a static approach, where a member of some well-staffed IT department could manually check out each server and switch one at a time.

But nowadays, there is a lot more IT equipment to contend with, the majority of which isn’t even located within the data center. For example, a retailer such as Pacific Sunwear may have 200 devices within its primary data center, but it has more than 7,000 other devices spread across its nearly 950 stores, including such items as video surveillance monitors, routers, and wireless access points. Meanwhile, an airline manufacturer might have hundreds of pieces of equipment on the shop floor, many of which have their own IP addresses.

And IT departments, particularly at small to midsized enterprises, are more overworked than ever before, so old-school network monitoring tools don’t cut it anymore. Given that finding the right network monitoring solution is yet another worry to pile on top of all the other things a data center manager has to remember, such as data security, mobile device management, and email archiving for compliance purposes (and these three were picked out of a hat holding 100 other issues), what criteria should managers keep in mind for choosing the best solution for their businesses?

Concentrate On The Baseline

Traditionally, network monitoring tools tracked the degree of availability within a network and inferred performance by measuring the utilization of server CPUs, memory, and network traffic, says Steve Harriman, vice president of marketing at NetQoS.

However, none of these issues matter if an end user working at a branch office 1,000 miles away from the corporate network is experiencing a 10-second response time when he or she is accustomed to, at most, a two-second one, Harriman says. Moreover, networks are handling many different types of data, all of which have differing characteristics about which traditional monitoring tools simply are clueless.

According to Harriman, the best measure for understanding how to monitor a network is setting baseline metrics in the server infrastructure for “normal” performance. If you have these baselines in place and discover deviations from these metrics, you will have an easier time determining why that eight-second latency has occurred for the aforementioned end user. “It could be because an application was poorly coded or because the application is chatty, with lots of calls to the corporate database before it gets to the end user’s screen,” Harriman says.

Determining this baseline should not be too challenging, as long as you do not overthink it. For example, voice data has strict requirements that are at the same time easy to measure. “Everyone knows when a call is good or not. If they experience a delay, stuttering, or no dial tone, they are going to hang up,” Harriman says.

Automate

For her part, Yankee Group analyst Vanessa Alvarez says that automation is a key criterion for choosing a network monitoring solution because it increases its functionality while lowering the IT resources required to keep abreast of what is taking place on the network. Automation capabilities also make the solution easier to manage and to integrate with systems as a whole, says Alvarez.

CITTIO’s Lerner says that automation is fundamental in any sophisticated IT environment that has multiple locations, incorporates a range of different devices, and is increasingly heterogeneous in nature. “You don’t really see 100% Microsoft or Cisco [setups] anymore, and a static approach makes things that much harder,” he says.

Nagios is system which helps not only to collect statistic information, but also to watch a product, and to warn you about faultiness.

Previous post was about Gangla which is intended for detailed consideration of statistic information, but not whole project. One of the most useful features is opportunity to group functions which are placed on server, and opportunity to report about faultiness accordingly groups but not single elements. Like Gangla, Nagios gives an opportunity to create tall structure of submission. This system also includes two components: information collection module and concentrator. This packet allows you to configure email distribution depending importance of critical system state.

There are a lot of different sections in monitoring system, for observing and checking. Such service is necessary in cases which require system support round the clock the whole year round.

Web servers like patients which need care. But it is impossible to watch by the server for round the clock. So there is another way. We can use website monitoring and network monitoring service. There is a lot of different website monitoring services both paid and free but it is rather more reliable to use paid website, network and server monitoring services, because you know for what you pay. When we chose website monitoring we have to pay attention

1. Does website monitoring company have monitoring checkpoints in different places of the Earth?
2. Does the list of services which provided by website and web server monitoring company includes control of HTTP, POP3, IMAP4, FTP, DNS and etc. Pay attention on quality of provided statistics.
3. Does service include such tools as Ping, Traceroute, DNS Query and etc?
4. Does website server service support notifications by email, ICQ or SMS? Is it possible to check your website statistics using WAP?
5. Is system of reports usable and clear? This factor is very important because you will have to analyze this statistics and to make summary.

This system is intended for monitoring of both one and numerous services, which are placed both in local and global networks. Ganglia uses RDD tool for information storage and a number of libraries for representation. One of the most features is opportunity to use history logs to get to know about server performance for the last year, month, day, hour. Another brilliant feature is possibility to use different platforms. This packet includes two components:
Modules which collect information are allotted to different servers.
Central concentrator, which accumulates this data (Windows module is absent at present day)
This packet gives an opportunity to use multilevel concentrators, for example if you have 3 segments you can provide each segment with single concentrator, besides you can use central concentrator for this purpose. The system allows data transfer using two protocols Multicast and Unicast.

Website Monitoring Software by Datadoctor provides online website performance effectiveness check. In cause of any fail website becomes inaccessible. This software simply works with HTTP, HTTPS, SMTP, POP3 and FTP server protocols. The program is very simple to use with Windows 98, ME, 2000, NT, XP, 2003, Vista.
Program resources:
It gives an opportunity to control website effectiveness on-line
Provides support of SMTP, HTTP, HTTPS, POP3 and FTP
Provides notifications in causes of fails
Do not requires any specific knowledge
System requirements:
128 Mb RAM
20 Mb free space on your HDD
Operating systems:
Windows 98, Windows 98 (SE), Windows ME, Windows 2000, Windows NT, Windows 2003 Server, Windows XP, Windows VISTA

The attendance is very important factor even for small private website. One of the most effective methods to increase the number of visitors is search engines optimization. You need some tools for this for example Se Monitor which can provide both optimization statistics and special optimization features. There are lots of different features, but I’ll introduce the most important.
Website Indexation – Se Monitor shows pages which are known by search engines, but also their search weight in Google PR.
Log Analyzer – supports IIS formats and Apache. The next information are analyzed: the number of unique IP, the number of visitors, the number of visitors from search engines.
Monitoring of External Links – During the process of searching links Se Monitor determines PR of link pages and there linking text.
HTML Analyzer – gives an opportunity to get full statistics of words and word-combinations not only on separate pages, but also on website as a whole.
Google Data-Centers – This feature helps to forecast your PR after next Google dance.
Se Monitor is intended for monitoring and for statistics. There is only one defect – there is no full help information.