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How to Pick the Right Networking Tools

July 7, 2016 No Comments

Featured article by Ed Tittel, network administrator at LinksysIntl

Networking tools play a vital role in network management. They help you identify glitches in the system, help you make proactive decisions in network administration and help meet compliance requirements among other things. However, before you find that software that will appeal to your needs, you have to do a lot of work understanding your network needs and reviewing different tools. The purpose of this post is to help you find the right networking tools for your organization needs.

Understand your requirements

The purpose of investing in a networking tool is so as to get a bird’s-eye view on network performance, faults, availability and traffic usage and also to quickly respond to issues. Network monitoring products are typically built for small to midsized networks, wired or wireless. For you to get a platform that offers the visibility you need into your virtual and physical servers, you need to first identify your networking needs.

What do you want to monitor? Are you targeting a wide area network (WAN) links or just software-defined network (SDN) architecture? Some tools will excel in monitoring cloud-based services while others do well in network-based apps monitoring. Knowing what you need will help narrow down your search.

Understand how network monitoring really works

The first goal of network monitoring is to keep tabs on the overall health of the network. Careful monitoring will help with the facilitation of proactive strategies like justifying cost of the hardware/ infrastructure upgrades. This can help save money by circumventing the issues of repetitive troubleshooting.

Networking tools with RightitNow Software will further enable you to enforce the service level agreement (SLAs). This is made possible by the clear insight you get into how the network is performing. A network that is performing well will further boost customer satisfaction.

Although you can use the free or built-in networking tools, most of them are inefficient. You need to invest in robust networking tools to guarantee uninterrupted access, ease of use as well as ensure uptime.

Know the key features you should have

The networking tools you end up investing in should make it possible for you to monitor, detect as well as analyze the network as well as all associated devices in real time. This is what enables the network administrator to respond to arising issues with ease.

The right monitoring tool has to be easy to implement and configure and it should support multiple vendor products. It should have node and device inventorying, auto-discovery, automatic & configurable alerts and should be tied through the web-based management interface. The interface should include an easy-to-use dashboard. There should be network topology maps and commands to help modify the network settings and troubleshoot problems. Avoid interfaces that only offer reporting and viewing.

In addition to making the above considerations, it is important that you focus on comprehensive networking tools that meet your everyday needs and offer scalability for your future expansion. You will have many options with both commercial and open-source networking tools. Give priority to the commercial tools because they offer better features.

Author Bio

Ed Tittel is a network administrator at LinksysIntl. He uses and recommends networking tools with RightitNow Software. Feel free to connect with him on LinkedIn.

 

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