Paessler has created a free checklist comprising 12 top tips for selecting the right network monitoring solution for customers.


According to Paessler's Sascha Neumeier, monitoring a large IT or network infrastructure can present several challenges that can be mitigated by making the right selection among the various network monitors on the market in the first place.


Firstly, the product must scale along with your infrastructure. Also, it must be able to monitor more than one datacentre as well as distributed networks.


"Networks often start small, but grow over time as new systems, functionality, devices, applications, and even new geographic locations are added," Neumeier points out.


Also, it should be vendor agnostic, facilitating a single overview of devices and systems, and support all major monitoring methods, technologies, and protocols, incorporating a broad feature set that can do the job of multiple monitoring tools as well as integrating with business intelligence (BI) systems.


"It’s helpful to be able to clearly designate users to teams and responsibilities, so that each team can be responsible for their own part of the infrastructure (and) in a large environment, you need to reduce the number of alerts to a meaningful minimum," Neumeier says.


Click here for the full checklist and blog post.


How PRTG Network Monitor can help


When insurer and asset manager AXA Gulf sought to guarantee datacentre uptime across its operations across the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Oman, Bahrain, and Qatar back in 2017, it turned to Paessler.


Suresh Lakshmikanthan, systems administrator at AXA Gulf, says that using Paessler's PRTG network monitoring has given the firm more efficiency during daily checks of application and systems performance. Operations are headquartered in Dubai (pictured).


"Insurance is a 24-hour business and we can’t afford to have our datacentres and applications down when our customers need help. Our technology is absolutely business-critical," Lakshmikanthan said, according to the Paessler customer case study.


At AXA Gulf, performance indicators are reviewed daily to ensure its datacentres and applications are running well. Memory and disk space, storage, hardware and servers, WAN, ping rates, application URLs, temperatures and humidity are all monitored.


Performance issues can be flagged during the day and alerts delivered out-of-hours via email or mobile to appropriate staff, via a central dashboard. Historical data can help identify the cause of issues and to prepare reports and plans for management, according to Paessler.


( Photo by Roman Logov on Unsplash )