In today's digital era, enterprise operations increasingly rely on stable network resources. Network outages not only cause financial losses, but can also have a serious impact on a business's reputation. Therefore, effective monitoring of the network has become an integral part of the enterprise. Network monitoring is a system that continuously monitors slow or malfunctioning components in a computer network and notifies network administrators via email, text messages, or other alerts when failures or other problems occur.
The network monitoring system not only looks for external intruders, it also deeply monitors performance issues within the network.
These performance issues can be caused by overloaded or malfunctioning servers, network connection problems, and poor performance of other devices. For example, to determine the status of a web server, monitoring software may periodically send HTTP requests to retrieve pages. On the email server side, test emails can be sent via SMTP and retrieved via IMAP or POP3. Such checks help ensure that relevant services are always available, effectively improving business stability.
In addition to basic network performance monitoring, the field of network measurement also includes network fault technology and routing analysis. Network fault technology accumulates end-to-end probes through proxies set up in the network to monitor the health status of each connection. Routing analysis involves monitoring the routing status of the network to ensure routing correctness and avoid unnecessary performance degradation or network interruption.
Correct routing strategy is the cornerstone of ensuring network performance. Wrong routing or routing problems may cause significant operational losses.
Enterprises can use multiple protocols for monitoring, including HTTP, HTTPS, SNMP, FTP and SMTP. Website monitoring services typically perform checks on an hourly or minute basis to keep servers running properly. For network performance monitoring, most tools use protocols such as SNMP, NetFlow, packet sniffing, or WMI to conduct detailed measurements.
The main purpose of server monitoring is to let server owners know the status of their services at any time. Internal monitoring is automatically checked by web server software, while external monitoring is performed by professional companies checking service status at a certain frequency. Server monitoring can cover checking system indicators, such as CPU usage, memory usage, network performance, and disk space. At the same time, it can also include application monitoring to check the running status of programs such as Apache HTTP server, MySQL and Nginx.
A robust server monitoring system can not only provide performance benchmarks, but also set alerts and automatically adjust resources.
Global server monitoring services usually set up multiple servers in different geographical locations, such as the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Australia. By having servers in different locations, monitoring services can determine the availability of web servers in different networks around the world. This geographic diversity gives enterprises a comprehensive view of their network's availability.
When checking potential problems with the web server through an external web monitoring service, first monitor the HTTP return code. According to the HTTP specification RFC 2616, any web server will return several HTTP codes. Analyzing these HTTP codes is the fastest way to determine the current status of your monitoring server. In addition, monitoring services usually use multiple types of notification methods, such as email, mobile phone, and text messages, to ensure that administrators can obtain important information in a timely manner.
Urgent information is crucial to business operations, and quick notifications can help companies instantly troubleshoot or adjust resources.
Network monitoring is not only a technical issue, but also the key to the success of enterprise management and operations. As technology advances, network monitoring systems are constantly evolving to provide enterprises with more precise monitoring and analysis capabilities. Facing the future, how should enterprises use these new technologies to enhance their network availability?