Network Monitoring

Network Monitoring

Network monitoring provides security guards for your computer and network. With these tools, you can easily manage your network's hardware and software. Tools can quickly identify problems, slow speeds, security breaches, and faulty hardware. Once identifying a problem, network monitoring programs will quickly notify a system administrator via e-mail, pager, or other specified alarm. Networking monitoring tools can perform a series of functions including sniffing, pinging, and port scanning.

Packet Sniffer

Packet sniffers have a number of different names including packet analyzers, network sniffers, network analyzers, Ethernet sniffers, and wireless sniffers. Packet sniffers are software or hardware solutions that are designed to intercept traffic passing over a digital network. All traffic that passes over a network will be logged.

Depending on the structure of the network, you can capture traffic for part of a network or for an entire network. For network monitoring purposes, you may want to monitor all the data packages using a network switch in conjunction with a port that is designed specifically for network monitoring.

Ping

A network involves a connection between at least two computers. These connections require occasional testing to ensure that they are strong and unbroken. This testing can be performed using a ping utility. Pings are normally used to test connection speeds and to find faults in the network. A ping works by sending out a reply request to another site. Once the reply returns, the utility computes time, routes, and much more. You can choose to receive automatic notification if a ping result is problematic.

Network Monitoring Software

Network monitoring software tools are used to analyze various aspects of a system. This software is specially designed to notify administrators of problems in order to ensure quick resolution.

Network monitoring tools scan networks for problems that could potentially be caused by overloaded or crashed servers. For example, determining the status of a certain web servers could be done by network monitoring software. This is done by sending Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) requests on a periodic basis in order to get a response from a page.

Port Scanning

Port scanning is a process designed to search network hosts for ports that are open and to acknowledge the ones that are closed. Port scanning can be done using port scanning software and is most commonly done by administrators as a means of checking network security. In order to scan a port, a host should scan their network for any ports that are listening on a single host. Another available option is port sweeping, which has to do with scanning multiple hosts in order to find a specific listening port.