What are the advantages of using IPHost Network Monitor when compared to manual monitoring?
Q: Why shall I bother installing IPHost if I can check everything manually?
A: To make sure the system is working as expected, miscellaneous utilities can be used; traditionally, on Linux platforms, programs like ‘ps’, ‘top’, ‘free’, ‘vmstat’, ‘iotop’ are used; along with lm-sensors package able to read the data from motherboard-provided sensors. Using ‘smartctl’ allows to keep track on hard disk health state.
Along with the mentioned programs, it is required to watch the system logs for the traces of security-related activity (i.e. log in attempts), software error messages and other signs of possible problems.
Manual monitoring is only efficient for small intranets; as soon as the amount of servers, network devices and workstations grows, manual checks become too cumbersome. If intrusion detection and traffic analysis are used, testing intranet health manually is no longer appropriate.
Instead, SNMP can be use to integrate the above checks into a readable SNMP data tree and install together all the required information from the single source and allowing to perform most of checks without human intervention. Certain checks are always done by human operator, but IPHost Network Monitor helps to eliminate the majority of routine, everyday tasks of overall intranet health control.
