What is the role of Network Monitoring Tools in NOCs?

Management of IT operations – the art of simplicity

Some disruptions aren’t good, especially when it comes to IT and service disruptions. With technology adoption accelerating faster than anyone could have predicted in 2020, so too have ITSM and ITOM demands.

The ITOM industry is taking the brunt of this technology explosion. The sheer number and frequency of alerts, the multitude of monitoring tools, and the resulting levels of noise within alert monitoring systems have become far too complicated to manage effectively. To resolve service tickets on the ITSM front, service agents juggle multiple screens, perform repetitive tasks, and perform manual processes.

Our goal with digital transformation is to improve the lives of our employees and customers by accelerating the way we work, reducing errors, and increasing efficiency. Thus, the focus of these IT tools should be on business outcomes and ease of use instead of simply IT outputs.

Expensive, repetitive, and noisy

Among the main challenges with alert monitoring tools is that they keep sending multiple notifications for the same issue every few seconds or minutes. It detracts from resolving the problem at hand since too much noise is created. Especially for midmarket companies with overstretched IT resources, this makes achieving the value of many ITOM enterprise solutions more difficult.

In today’s world, all the noise, expense, and complexity are unnecessary. This is especially important in a time when hybrid working and distributed teams have become the norm. It’s possible to automatically comb through the data in real-time and apply rules and policies to prioritize what’s important using machine learning.

Businesses can anticipate service disruption and intelligently minimize IT impact by combining incident response, efficient change management, and AI-enhanced alerting.

What Are the Functions of Network Monitoring Tools?

To manage performance, troubleshoot faults, and stay on top of network operations, network monitoring tools collect data from various components of the network. Signals or pings are sent to the various system ports as one of the primary actions. Using these tools, you can identify problems and bottlenecks by measuring how long it takes to get a response. Additionally, you can identify faulty components that require replacement.

Generally, network monitoring makes use of network management protocols such as Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), command-line interface (CLI) protocols, and Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI). Network monitoring is usually supported by agents.

Additionally, many of these systems can read network flows. You can monitor the flow of traffic across your network through network flow monitoring. The way to accomplish this is to pay attention to a wide variety of communications occurring within the network. These flows can, for example, be collected by routers, so that they can be analyzed. In computing, there are several layers of communication, including transport layers and application layers. These layers can generate a lot of communications on their own. It is important to monitor NOC activity.

The Best Network Testing Tools for Speed and Performance in 2021

Though each tool is unique, they have similar features like performance testing, alerting capabilities, and data visualization. Here is a list of network testing tools:

  1. Dynatrace
  2. Datadog
  3. SolarWinds NPM
  4. SolarWinds ETS (Wan Killer)
  5. PRTG Network Monitor
  6. PingPlotter

A list of the top network monitoring software vendors

The network monitoring market is crowded with many vendors. We have carefully evaluated the following products, in no particular order:

  • WhatsUp Gold
  • Path Solutions
  • LogicMonitor
  • Plixer
  • SolarWinds
  • Site24x7
  • ManageEngine
  • Paessler
  • Zabbix

The key trends in network monitoring

It might seem that the field of network monitoring has not changed. Even though traditional networks continue to be monitored, the scope of network monitoring is rapidly expanding. In today’s world, the Internet of Things (IoT) is subject to network monitoring tools. Each IoT device is therefore a monitoring node.

In a similar vein, edge computing opens up a whole new world of networking. There are IoT sensors in every car, every traffic light, and every cat eye on the road, so that’s a lot of devices, and that’s just in the transportation sector. When multiplied across all other economic sectors and vertical markets, it will ultimately amount to tens, and perhaps hundreds, of billions.

Network monitoring also changed as a result of the pandemic. Since so many people work from home, IT suddenly understood the importance of effective network management after perhaps taking this field for granted for some time. Individual users could see any loss of continuity as a threat. Over the past year or so, network administrators and IT staff have experienced great pressure due to the need for reliable VPNs and the phenomenal rise in videoconferencing.

A targeted, easy, and affordable service

NOC monitoring service teams can centrally monitor alerts from different monitoring tools by automatically gathering alerts in one place. The problem of numerous, repetitive notifications can be solved by one alert producing multiple alert logs. You can create your own rules to decide which alerts should be turned into incidents since not every alert requires action. This way, thousands of alert notifications can be reduced to hundreds, which can be converted into a handful of actionable incidents – reducing noise and lowering the time to restore an incident or outage.

Organizations should be able to apply alert rules to route incidents to the right teams, customize on-call schedules, allow very diverse teams to collaborate on the same platform, and display the full context on incident pages to make things simple and eliminate wasted time. In overworked and under pressure IT departments, automation, and artificial intelligence are the perfect antidote.

Midmarket companies have typically been unable to afford sophisticated solutions, but with the combination of ITOM and ITSM capabilities, these capabilities are much more accessible. Midmarket associations would now be able to oversee occurrence reaction on a brought together stage with the force of an advanced arrangement and AI’s knowledge.

Over the past few years, third-party software has repeatedly neglected the mid-market because it’s costly and complex. In this case, providing easy, modern, right-sized options for smaller companies represents disruption at its best.

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