Being the world’s most trusted open-source monitoring solution means that businesses of every size and description turn to us for their network monitoring needs. This gives us an inside look at how easy it is for them to suffer disruptive network failures, which usually happen thanks to relatively simple miscalculations.
Network monitoring mistakes are easy to make but often challenging and time-consuming to fix, so we’ve put together a list of five of the most common mistakes that we see users make. We’ve also shown how Zabbix’s built-in features can help prevent them when combined with our experience and expertise.
Table of Contents
Network monitoring mistake 1: Playing defense with security threats
As technology evolves, security threats grow and mutate much faster than before. A cybersecurity team that takes a purely reactive approach to the latest round of digital threats will constantly be playing catch-up, unable to challenge network vulnerabilities and putting their entire network at risk.
Zabbix is designed to help enterprises go beyond the traditional network monitoring strategy of reacting to performance and security problems as they occur. Zabbix can, for example, trace failed logins (which are often possible hacking attempts) as well as unexpected successful logins.
If an anomaly is discovered, Zabbix uses multiple messaging channels to notify the responsible individuals in your organization about the different kinds of events occurring in your environment This allows you to discover potential threats before they happen and react to them before they become a problem.
Network monitoring mistake 2: Getting left behind when technology evolves
Networking technologies continually evolve, so monitoring technologies need to evolve with them, offering even better visibility. By failing to make use of new monitoring technologies as they’re released, companies leave themselves wide open to network problems. Employees get comfortable with tools and solutions and are often reluctant to change or upgrade, but not doing so puts your network at risk.
At Zabbix, we offer our users a quality product and a variety of support options. Every six months we release a new stable version, and each new Zabbix software release is subject to a standard life cycle and expiry date. Our life cycle specifics also help make content for all new version releases more predictable and manageable.
If you’re already using Zabbix (and we hope that you are), taking advantage of our upgrade solution is the perfect way to make sure you don’t fall behind the curve when it comes to monitoring technology. We work side by side with your team and adapt to your environment so that your upgrade gets taken care of with no disruption and in line with our best practices.
Network monitoring mistake 3: Not having the right performance data and insights
Every enterprise or business will have different network performance requirements, which in turn will require examining different performance metrics and having different performance expectations and baselines. The key is being able to separate the signal (useful performance data and insights) from the noise (everything else) so that you can properly judge your network’s behavior and take appropriate action.
Zabbix’s web UI provides multiple ways of presenting a visual overview of your IT environment. Widget-based multi-page dashboards display information in an easy-to-digest format, so even laymen can see what’s happening with the network at a glance.
Flexible graphs can display regular and aggregate data, and all display options allow you to filter and display only the data you need, at any level of granularity you may require. The goal is to make it as easy as possible for you to prioritize useful insights over all others.
Network monitoring mistake 4: Ignoring network logs
Modern networking devices generate logs that contain vital information. Network management teams can use this information to provide higher security, improved efficiency, and less downtime. Not collecting and using these logs is ignoring free information that you could use to run your network better.
Zabbix makes log monitoring easy by allowing you to collect, filter, and analyze log entries. Monitoring firewall logs with Zabbix, for example, allows you to identify things like unusual traffic patterns, blocked connections, and denied access logs. With more advanced or “smart” firewalls, you can read logs and create intrusion alerts in Zabbix.
When it comes to Windows logs, you can track the success or failure of user logins and monitor IP addresses to see whether login attempts are coming from a trusted network or not. VPN connections (source IP, multiple failed connection attempts, etc.) are also a snap to monitor with Zabbix. It’s all part of our “single pane of glass” philosophy that allows SNMP traps, logs, and other sources to all be monitored with a single tool.
Network monitoring mistake 5: Failing to plan for network growth
Simply focusing on how your network is performing now doesn’t cut it – you also need to prepare yourself for what your network might become. Any planned changes to your network need to be considered when planning out your monitoring strategies. That means projecting what the state of your network will be and considering how additions to your network might affect performance.
Zabbix is designed to be scalable to any infrastructure – our customers use it to monitor anything from smart homes to multi-tenant global business environments. And when it’s time to expand your network, you can gain an extra layer of scalability by deploying Zabbix Proxies, which allow you to collect millions of metrics from hundreds of thousands of devices, services, and applications.
Conclusion
Monitoring a modern network is a challenging task, and Murphy’s Law (anything that can go wrong will go wrong, and at the worst possible time) is never far from the mind of any network management professional. However, in our experience, network management teams can avoid the most common network monitoring mistakes by following the advice we’ve outlined in this post.
If you want to see for yourself how Zabbix can help you monitor your network as efficiently as possible and avoid common network monitoring mistakes, get in touch with us.