If a picture is worth a thousand words, a network map, dashboard, report, or other style of visualization is invaluable for IT pros. While network admins may live deep in the weeds, their bosses and other company execs prefer a high-level view that presents the big story.
“Network visualization creates an “illustration” of the network through mapping, diagraming, or drawing how network elements are arranged and connected. This overview of server, router and connections shows if these connections are wireless or hardwired and describes the data flows. Some maps also offer real-time insight into node status as well. This not only helps you better understand your network but also enables you to easily catch, identify and address critical health and performance issues in your network,” explained the Maintaining Optimal Network Performance blog. Network visualization is also called network mapping, network map visualization, network graph visualization and network topology mapping. This visualization gives IT clear network insight and is crucial to maintaining optimal network performance.
With a proper network monitoring solution, you can visualize almost anything related to the network or applications and services. Here are a few things to start with:
Dashboards are a single interface that unifies all network-related data. They are, in a sense, a higher-level, more immediate view of the data contained in reports. Each IT pro can customize what the dashboards show, just as they can customize reports.
With Progress WhatsUp Gold, there are various default dashboards, such as the home dashboard, which offers a macro-level overview of your network. From this high-level home dashboard, one can drill down into more specific details via other dashboards about devices, applications, types of services, etc.
WhatsUp Gold default dashboards include which devices are down as reported by your active monitors and the top ten devices by ping response type.
We recommend the home dashboard, which visually shows the overall health of the network and its core components, such as the core network, access points, server room and branch offices. Other dashboards can show the status and health of devices, such as routers, switches, virtual machines and VoIP. Dashboards can even track a specific critical device, and here, IT can drill down deep into a detailed view based on data gathered from multiple reports that track that device.
Dashboards aren’t just static but can show real-time availability and performance data.
This unified dashboard helps IT visualize performance and network bandwidth and stay ahead of configuration and network inventory issues.
Reports are surfaced and readily available through the dashboard, and these reports are vital to spotting frequently occurring problems and nipping them in the bud. Imagine you have one pesky server that crashes a hundred times a year. IT management might not even know this is a problem because the server is restarted by whoever happens to be around. A server report will reveal the troubling truth, giving IT a heads up to finally address the underlying problem, which could be a misconfiguration, malware, an OS issue or a sign it is time for new hardware.
While there is a near-unlimited range of available reports, here are four types to keep your network running smoothly:
Availability Reports: These show what devices or areas of the network went up or down during a given period. If the data is truly real-time, IT can tell exactly when a device went down, how long it was out, and when it came back to life. IT can also view a downtime percentage for the device, so they know its historical health.
Performance Reports: These reports show how well the devices performed. For example, IT can see the bandwidth of a specific port on a switch over time and then view a graph showing how much is transmitted through that port. Applications can also be tracked and you can see a report on the top (or worst) performers.
Network Traffic Reports: These include top talkers, latency, bottlenecks and more.
Cloud Resource Reports: These reports provide details on cloud usage and spending, performance and trends. They show IT where and how to optimize resources.
Other useful reports include:
The above data points guide IT in capacity planning and meeting (or beating) service-level agreements (SLAs).
A detailed topology map is now essential for compliance regulations like PCI-DSS. By visualizing the network’s devices, their interconnections, location, and interdependencies, administrators can monitor network devices, proactively identify failures/bottlenecks and reduce the mean time to repair (MTTR). With this information, you can improving your disaster recovery efforts and maintaining business continuity.
The discovery and mapping capabilities of WhatsUp Gold use Layer 2 and Layer 3 discovery methods to create comprehensive network topology maps showing all network elements, including routers, switches, VLANs, physical and virtual servers and workstations. The tool offers a high degree of customization and any aspect of the topology and individual links can be hidden/displayed.
Built-in features include drag-and-drop functionality, device-monitor correlation on the map, device details like attributes and status alongside the device icon and a choice of spoke/hierarchical/custom views. By correlating Layer 3 addressing to Layer 2 maps, WhatsUp Gold provides an in-depth, integrated Layer 2/3 topology map that shows both IP and interface-level connectivity
WhatsUp Gold Wireless Network Map
WhatsUp Gold monitors bandwidth usage and provides a visual representation or ‘heat map’ of the status of links between your devices. With one click, you can see which interface links are fine (green), becoming congested (yellow), or approaching capacity (red). These thresholds are customizable and you can trigger alerts if any links exceed a set threshold. This overlay lets you see network congestion at a glance and helps you optimize network bandwidth usage and architect your network effectively.
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