Network monitoring -- Best practices

Network measurement and diagnostics expert Loki Jorgenson was recently asked a question about best practices for monitoring network performance. The question raised some thoughts on how networking and its best practices have changed in recent years.

"Best practices" have a short half-life in our industry. The biggest problem I see with today's management techniques and tools is that they grew up in the client/server era and haven't evolved to serve today's realities.

In the old world...

• You owned or controlled most of the networks your key applications depended on.
• You could predict where critical traffic would flow.
• Complex, long-deployment, agent-based systems were approved for deployment because the problems client/server created were new, acute and very scary.
• You dealt with a dog's breakfast of vendor-specific protocols.

In today's world...

• You depend on networks you do not own or control. (ISP, ASP, customer, supplier, etc.)
• You can't predict where tomorrow's traffic will flow or what will break next.
• There is less -- or no -- time and money for deployment or maintenance of big, complex network management systems.
• It's "IP everything/everywhere."

So what should "best practices" look like?

• Be able to see end-to-end, from the application's view point.
• Be able to deploy "just-in-time" network management infrastructure -- rapidly, where needed, when needed, on demand.
• Be able to see into and through networks that you don't own.
• Employ monitoring technologies that provide thorough network awareness on an ongoing basis, not piecemeal views.
• Rely less on trend analysis and more on real-time assessment.
• Emphasize "effective" over "absolute" -- implement management solutions that resolve your most common, most expensive problems most quickly.
• Focus on application performance after the fundamental networking performance aspects have been addressed.
• Use methodologies and technologies that fit your network and needs, not the other way around.

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The approach to this might be laid out in two steps:

1. Continuous monitoring of performance (not just availability) as a essential starting point, ideally at the Layer 3 or 4 demarcation point (at a minimum) so you can separate network performance issues from application ones quickly. This has to be end-to-end along all critical paths, and most others of interest, with constant updating.
2. Rapid response to performance problems that slip through the cracks. That requires a real-time measurement/assessment/problem diagnosis capability that delivers quickly, without pre-deployed infrastructure, and can be used remotely.