Your IT infrastructure is under attack. How do you know which network monitoring tools to use?

1️⃣ SolarWinds 2️⃣ Wireshark 3️⃣ Nagios 4️⃣ PRTG Network Monitor 5️⃣ Splunk These tools provide real-time insights, robust security features, and seamless integration.

Most network monitoring tools, pretty much, only detect DoS attacks, and that is it. Firewall logs are how you see an attack in real-time, but the questions context the attack is happening. Network Profiling Tools, are a class of networking monitoring tools that can detects attacks. Cisco Stealth watch is an example in this class. EDR/XDR are the category of solutions that that catch hackers today. Network monitoring tools, are typically less effective today because the hackers have come to expect there use by organizations today. They know you have network monitoring tools, and have adopted to that.

Network monitoring tools are of vital importance as they enable IT teams to: - Proactively Detect Issues: Network monitoring tools continuously interface with your network devices and identify anomalies or performance degradation issues. They help identify potential issues before they escalate. - Optimize Network Performance: Metrics like bandwidth available, usage, and traffic patterns allow network administrators to make informed decisions for capacity planning. - Secure the Network: monitoring tools can detect anomalies in network traffic caused by a security attack. - Save Costs: Help Desk teams can save costs in support hours by empowering the technicians to gather all the data required to promptly address a customer complaint.

There are three main types of network monitoring tools. Each type has a specific function, set of functionalities, and vendors. Some vendors offer solutions that incorporate all three types of network monitoring, while some vendors specialize in one specific type. The three main types of network monitoring tools are: - SNMP-based tools that report the status and performance of network devices, such as routers and firewalls. - Passive network monitoring that capture traffic to identify network activity, apps performance, and security incidents. - Active network monitoring for continuous synthetic monitoring to measure end-to-end performance and proactive alert of network issues.

Each type of tool has its own specific use case and function. However, you may short list in each category more than one option. When that happens, it’s important to compare common functionalities, and see which one score betters in specific areas that are important for your use case. Here are some of the most important categories you could evaluate: - Scalability, how well does the tool scale? - Real-time monitoring, how recent is the data displayed on the dashboard? How fast is the detection of issues? - Alerting supported, does it just support up-down alerts or also baselines or more advance statistics? - License model, commercial or open source? - Integrations available - Historical data retention - Supported platforms - Cost