Monitoring Networks: Prevention Costs Less than Cure

Network failure can occur in good economic times and bad, but the cost of lost business is felt much more keenly in a tight market. And, as with many things, the earlier a potential issue is identified and addressed, the less harm it is likely to cause your bottom line.

“Monitoring is key to keeping your network healthy and preventing problems.”

Monitoring is the key to keeping your network healthy, preventing problems and dealing with them before they escalate. The main elements of effective network monitoring are skilled humans with the right diagnostic tools, protection policies and maintenance procedures.

Troubleshoot Network Problems Before they Escalate:

1. Set performance benchmarks: A fall in network uptime, power uptime, applications availability and the like often indicate trouble.
2. Schedule maintenance windows: Pay particular attention to critical network components, such as firewalls and routers.
3. Assign responsibility: As obvious as it sounds, many (especially smaller) companies don’t clarify who’s responsible for ongoing monitoring. When using an external service, make sure they offer web-accessed monitoring software that lets you check on the health of your network at any time via a secure extranet or portal.
4. Blend internal/external resources: One cost effective way for a normal working-hours business to implement round-the-clock monitoring is to have your IT staff hand over to an outside monitoring service at the end of the business day. It’s less expensive than paying someone to be on-site from 6pm to 9am.
5. Ensure you have round the clock service: When working with an outside network monitoring vendor, make sure they provide round the clock service, on-site or remotely, as required.

Find out about how you can win with comprehensive network monitoring.

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