Every organisation is different, but the importance of the network to the business is remarkably consistent. As companies grow, their networks expand not just in size and complexity, but in strategic value. The network underpins how people collaborate, communicate, and conduct business — hosting applications, enabling services, and carrying the critical data that keeps operations running.
Because the network is so central to day‑to‑day business, its availability and performance are essential. At the same time, maintaining reliability is increasingly difficult. Modern networks face constant pressure from security threats, outages, configuration sprawl, and rapid change driven by new technologies, distributed architectures, and evolving business demands.
That’s why effective network management and monitoring are no longer optional. When a business depends on its network — as most do — having clear visibility, actionable insight, and disciplined monitoring practices is critical to protecting uptime, reducing risk, and supporting growth.
Systems Administrators and other IT pros are sometimes told to cut tasked costs by reducing or, better yet, eliminating monitoring software spawl. If you have several network monitoring systems in place, you likely suffer from dashboard overload.
Having a single source of the truth that’s accessible to the entire team is crucial to the long-term success of your IT organization. If the network team is using one tool, system administrators using another, and your application team another — there will be conflict and finger-pointing. With all your monitoring being done in one solution, teams will demonstrate more accountability and teamwork. Plus, a single solution dramatically reduces costs.
Where can you or should you deploy your network monitoring solution? The general rule of thumb is, if the operating system can reach the systems you want to monitor, it does not matter where it is deployed. You can deploy network monitoring inside Amazon AWS (Amazon Web Services), Microsoft Azure, or other cloud environments. IT pros at smaller shops can even run network monitoring on a system under their desk, or a laptop on top of your desk.
The best advice is to deploy your monitoring solution in a place that makes it highly available while still reaching all the systems you want to monitor.
Because the network is a mission‑critical business system, it’s essential to have the right information at the right time. Effective monitoring starts with visibility into the devices and services that keep the business running, from core network infrastructure like routers and switches, to the servers and applications users and customers rely on every day.
At a minimum, availability and performance should be monitored for anything that could impact productivity, revenue, or customer experience. That includes critical services such as email, websites, file transfers, and line‑of‑business applications. Even if the entire network isn’t down, the loss of a single essential service for an hour can bring work to a halt.
Customer‑facing resources deserve special attention. Many critical touchpoints, such as web services, email, file transfer, and APIs, are technically applications running on servers, not standalone devices. Monitoring these services ensures customers can connect, transact, and access what they need, even when the underlying infrastructure appears healthy. Visibility into customer‑facing availability helps teams identify issues before they impact experience or revenue.
Capacity and resource utilisation are equally important. Monitoring disk usage on key servers helps prevent outages caused by full volumes and can highlight abnormal behaviour that points to underlying application or system issues. Tracking CPU, memory, and interface utilisation over time allows teams to spot trends early and plan upgrades before performance degradation affects users.
Security and operational health also play a role in knowing what to monitor. Firewalls, antivirus systems, update services, and malware defences should be monitored not just for presence, but for correct operation. There’s a meaningful difference between having security controls in place and knowing they’re actually working as expected.
Finally, broader network activity provides valuable context. Monitoring traffic patterns, log events, and system messages helps teams understand peak usage periods, anticipate capacity needs, and identify issues before users notice them. In complex, mixed environments, spanning different operating systems, device types, and locations, comprehensive monitoring ensures nothing critical falls through the cracks.
Knowing what to monitor also depends on understanding how your network is designed and how systems depend on one another. Clear visibility into device relationships, service paths, and traffic flow helps prevent blind spots and reduces time spent diagnosing symptoms instead of root causes. When teams understand how issues propagate across the network, monitoring becomes more accurate, actionable, and aligned with real business impact.
A cool best practice for alerting may sound counterintuitive but is true – less is more. Here is a perfect example. We came across a customer who was repeating the same actions every two minutes. When a system became unavailable, they’d get an email alert – even when it was only down for a minute. Every two minutes after that, the network monitoring tool kept emailing. They got so used to it, people started ignoring the alerts. When there are too many alerts, people tune them out.
Our recommendation is to make sure emails only go out when someone has to log in and do something. If you are sending out an email from the monitoring system, and no one had to log in and do something – you are spamming them and should reconfigure the system.
Make sure any alarm that comes out gives you something actionable. Take CPU utilization, especially in a virtual environment. A lot of people want an alert if CPU usage exceeds 90% for 30 minutes. That is a bad idea because that is normal for well-designed infrastructure. If you are alerted at the 90% threshold, the natural inclination is to log in and do something like stop a process to free up the CPU. However, in a virtual environment, you are supposed to size systems so they run at near capacity.
The recommendation instead is if a CPU is running at 99% or greater for 30 minutes, then you absolutely want to email about that and offer an action a user should take. You might log in and stop a process in that scenario.
The key best practice when it comes to actions is making sure you only notify people when they can actually do something. Do not just notify for the sake of notification. Instead, notify to alert someone that they need to log in and get an issue fixed.
Even without alerts, key information is still being gathered, and you are still going to get that information when you are looking at your network monitoring dashboards or reports— it's just not sending danger alerts that you must do something right away when you do not.
Actionable alerts are especially important when disaster‑recovery decisions are involved. With enough early warning, teams can shift workloads to backup systems, trigger failover, or apply recovery procedures before an outage escalates. Without effective network monitoring, issues may go unnoticed until it is too late to act. Monitoring that supports timely recovery decisions helps minimise downtime and protect business continuity.
As with the question of what to monitor, setting up reports is really on a case-by-case basis in terms of what customers need to see. There is no ‘one size fits all,’ which is why the flexibility of network monitoring reporting is so crucial. The good news is that network monitoring reporting is a blank slate, and you can do with it almost whatever you want.
First, you need to define what your requirements are, how often you need reports, and what you want them to cover.
One of the most common use cases is reporting on uptime for the previous month and sending that to management. In many cases, IT is measured based on the percentage of the availability of the systems they are responsible for.
Some people run daily reports about network bandwidth utilization, giving them a close view of their performance, which allows them to easily spot any traffic that is outside of expectations. Others want to see the same information every day about disk space usage. It all depends on the individual, team, or scenario.
Scheduling reports are critical. You want to get the data frequently enough that you can act and track it, and long enough that you can see trends. Report frequency depends on the criticality of the function and history of events and issues. Schedule the ones you must see often.
Feel free to explore what the reports have to offer. So much data is at your fingertips. In WhatsUp Gold, you can even just search for a report name. You do not even have to know how to browse for it in the interface. There is a little magnifying glass which you click for more info. You could search CPU and it will show you the CPU reports, et cetera.
Reports can also have various levels of detail. A person whose job involves the network would get more detailed reports, and then higher-ups executives within the company get less detailed reports looking at the overall health of the network.
Those reports, especially, if you look back in a historical way, help guide the future architecture of the network. You can see where your company is at, know that it is growing a certain amount, and plan to ramp up capacity accordingly.
Bandwidth is obviously a key area to track. With bandwidth monitoring, you will spot slower connections or perhaps discover that an older server is slowing things down.
There are various editions and deployment options available for WhatsUp Gold. For most companies, a single WhatsUp Gold server is all they need. For larger businesses or enterprises, we have the option of deploying multiple WhatsUp Gold servers in a distributed architecture. By leveraging what we call ‘scalability pollers,’ we have the capability of scaling up to 100,000 monitors.
To truly understand your network, you need a network monitoring solution that delivers the right information in real time and is accessible whenever and wherever it’s needed. Visibility loses value if insight arrives too late or can’t be accessed when issues occur.
For organisations of any size, ease of use and speed of deployment matter just as much as depth of capability. A monitoring solution should keep total cost of ownership predictable while still providing the reliability required to support a high‑availability network. When the network is critical to business operations, teams need a solution they can depend on consistently.
Because monitoring generates large volumes of data, clarity is essential. Effective solutions present information through intuitive dashboards that bring together network maps, alerts, reports, and historical data in one view. This not only simplifies troubleshooting but also helps teams analyse trends, understand capacity demands, and make informed planning decisions over time.
Alerting flexibility is another key differentiator. Alerts should surface meaningful issues while avoiding unnecessary noise, particularly during planned maintenance windows. The ability to distinguish between planned and unplanned downtime helps ensure teams respond only when action is truly required.
Finally, modern environments demand flexibility in both access and monitoring methods. Monitoring should support secure, role‑based access so users see only the information relevant to their responsibilities. It should also support multiple monitoring technologies, such as SNMP for network devices and WMI for Windows‑based systems and applications, ensuring comprehensive coverage across diverse, mixed environments.
If you’re looking to build a stronger foundation for monitoring and managing modern IT environments, the ABCs of IT Infrastructure Monitoring eBook is a great place to start.
This practical guide walks through the core concepts of IT infrastructure monitoring, what matters, why it matters, and how to approach monitoring to support availability, performance, and security as environments grow more complex.
In this eBook, you’ll explore:
Whether you’re refining an existing monitoring strategy or starting fresh, the ABCs of IT Infrastructure Monitoring provides a clear, accessible framework to help teams monitor with confidence.
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