What is Network Monitoring?

Reliable delivery of IT services in an enterprise or corporate environment requires observability platforms to monitor the availability and performance of key IT systems and applications. In the field of AIOps and Observability, the phrase "network monitoring" is often tossed around in conversation. Like many terms in IT, the definition of network monitoring may be relative.

Historically, monitoring and observability are often siloed by technical domains, organizations, budget lines, geographies, and other chasms. Staff from various backgrounds may position monitoring within their own paradigm and use network monitoring in relative terms.

Two high-level definitions emerge. In many cases, network monitoring refers to watching the health and performance of the data network itself, ensuring connectivity between endpoints and applications/services. Observability platforms focus on the health of routers, switches, firewalls, VPN's, DNS, load balancers, and the like. Extra focus is placed on the performance of network interfaces for WAN circuits (e.g., utilization, errors, drops). Performance monitoring of connectivity pathways via simple or complex means (e.g., simple pings or more involved synthetics) is also common. 

The second common definition is broader, expanding the scope to include monitoring all devices or systems connected to the enterprise network. This can include servers, storage, applications, IoT devices, cloud services, and SaaS, but it generally omits end-user endpoints (e.g., laptops and mobile devices).

Both are important for reliable, cost-effective delivery of IT services. Stakeholders, architects, engineers, and operators simply must agree on the definition that makes the most sense for their organization. This is of utmost importance when reviewing an organization's observability strategy and vision.

How do you use the phrase network monitoring? Post in the comments!