• What is network monitoring?
• How important is network monitoring?
• What can network monitoring systems monitor?
• What kind of networks can they monitor?
• What strategic tasks can network monitoring systems do?
• What questions can network monitoring answer?
• What can network monitoring do for me?
• What tools will I find in network monitoring systems?
• What kinds of network monitoring systems are available?
• What do they cost?

You might think that if the network is up and running, there is no reason to mess with it. Why should you care about adding another project for your network managers to scribble across their whiteboards, already crammed floor-to-ceiling? The reasons to insist on network monitoring can be summarized on a high level into maintaining the network's current health, ensuring availability and improving performance. An NMS also can help you build a database of critical information that you can use to plan for future growth.

Network monitoring is like a visit to a cardiologist. You're combining experience, judgment and technology to chart a system's performance.

Your doctor is watching for danger signs as blood flows through vessels, valves and chambers of the heart, while your network monitoring systems are tracking data moving along cables and through servers, switches, connections and routers.

That analogy holds up especially when you consider how important real-time information is in both cases.

Of course, network monitoring differs in that smart companies don't settle for annual snapshots of system performance. Nor do they monitor only after the appearance of disturbing symptoms. They monitor their networks 24 hours a day, every day.