Let’s face it, there is always a possibility of networks being affected by worms and viruses. If it happens, they can replicate at an alarming rate and slow your network considerably. While you may be trying to resolve the issue as quickly as possible, the fact is your organization is experiencing downtime. Bottom line impact of downtime can be devastating, especially in terms of monetary loss. Sometimes, it is time consuming and tedious to troubleshoot without proper stats of the network or router/switch ports.
Say, you just received an alert that one of your access switch is down. Naturally, your performance monitoring tool will show that node in red, but you notice that some of the pings are still getting back. So, you run a web based traceroute, which shows that some of the nodes in a path are reporting higher response times than usual, whereas the target device replies sporadically.
Having historical visibility into erring ports and port utilization/errors is good, but it’s immensely helpful to visualize these in real-time. When you visualize the interfaces in a chart, you could easily see the high utilization of the uplink interface and the associated access switchport that generates the high traffic. Now, all you have to do is SSH to the switch and shut down the port, so that the response times in Tracert and Bandwidth utilization values are restored to their in normal values.
To find out if a router or switch is routing significant amounts of traffic, you need a real-time troubleshooting software that can isolate exactly which port is generating the traffic. For example, using Engineer’s Toolset’s Interface Monitor, you can get real-time statistics by capturing and analyzing SNMP data from multiple routers and switches simultaneously. You can watch live monitoring statistics for both received, transmitted traffic (Rx, Tx or Rx + Tx) from a set of statistic groups like percent utilization, bandwidth, total bytes transferred, error packets, and discarded packets. You can also set warning and critical thresholds for specific interfaces.
In order to do this, select the interfaces you want to monitor and configure in Interface Monitor: polling interval, metrics, and thresholds based on your requirements. You can set the polling interval to collect statistics as frequently as every 5 seconds.
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Cyber-attacks can hit your network hard and keep you awake at night. So, why not avoid the onslaughts of viruses and worms with properly maintained IT infrastructure and effective monitoring? Reacting to a threat faster and keeping your networks ticking with optimal performance is something that can keep the network admins on their toes. The ability to respond quickly to bandwidth and network performance issues using the right tools can save time and money, and increase the overall productivity of the users using the network.
