Having actionable insight into the goings on of your network – or what many refer to as network visibility – is tantamount to managing operational variables and understanding the security threats assailing the network. The following steps help IT keep its balance while gaining clear visibility.
Don't let capacity limit access to monitoring information – Capacity restrictions that hamper full monitoring coverage make it difficult to gain a full understanding of how well the network is performing. Organizations should implement a monitoring solution that engages all tools required for maximum visibility.
Reduce unnecessary data and costs – It's critical to find ways to reduce packet clutter. The more unnecessary packets cluttering network traffic, the harder it is to sift through data to find necessary information for maintaining solid performance and spotting security issues.
Get the ROI you want from your existing monitoring tools – Organizations should consider instituting port balancing to enable optimized distribution of information. Meanwhile, using three-stage filtering – ingress, egress and dynamic filtering – will ensure that the right amount and type of information is distributed to appropriate tools.
Optimize incident response to reduce mean time to repair – By developing a set of trigger scripts, organizations can respond when problematic conditions are met. So, in the case of security, if network traffic is deemed by the security tool to be suspicious, it will be sent to the appropriate security tool or network recorder for analysis.
Optimize your network with trend analysis – Network planning requires long-term strategies that depend on business intelligence. By using historical trend data, organizations are better able to institute proactive network optimization on the operations side, rather than running the network reactively. Choose a solution that reduces complexity through a consistent management interface across all deployment scenarios.
