The old adage An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure holds true today in the realm of network monitoring. Monitoring your servers, the applications that run on them, and your network devices can alert you to problems and give you a chance to fix them before your users notice. By monitoring your network and keeping a history, you can draw on this data to provide accurate information to users who might have an exaggerated notion of how often a particular problem has occurred. Just as important, network monitoring lets you know exactly what's happening on your network, as well as who's accessing it and when. So, there are two types of monitoring. In this article, I refer to the former as operations monitoring and the latter as security monitoring.
Large enterprises sometimes divide these two types of monitoring into separate processes performed by operations and information security staff, but small-to-midsized businesses (SMBs) tend to implement one overall monitoring process, for several reasons. Regardless of budget and staff size, SMB networks typically don't need the level of operational monitoring that larger enterprises require. SMB networks don't run as close to capacity as enterprise networks do, and they're much simpler to maintain. Also, SMB networks aren't as highly engineered and don't need the detailed trend analysis and reporting that slower-moving enterprises require. . . .
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