Enterprise Monitoring – What to monitor?

In today’s enterprise infrastructure you have more than just a server to monitor. There are routers, firewalls, logs, Internet of Things (IOT), storage units, and the lists go on and on. So as an IT professional you must make sure everything is up and running, plus everything needs to be connected and talking to each together. Let’s start with the basics.

Network Infrastructure Monitoring

First, I would want to look at monitoring your network infrastructure. If your systems cannot talk to each other then you are dead in the water. Most firewalls, routers, and switches can be monitored 2 ways: either with the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) or the Secure Shell Protocol (SSH).  SNMP has 3 different versions: SNMPv1, SNMPv2, and SNMPv3. Each of them has a different set of authentication rules and follow different RFC’s. SNMPv3 is the most secured because it uses encryption to pass data. SSH in its basic form is a list of commands that once the monitoring system logs into the system, it can run commands to get the information from the device.

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Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)

Security information and event management (SIEM) is security information and event management software that provides organizations with next-generation detection, analytics, and response capabilities. SIEM software combines security information management (SIM) and security event management (SEM) to provide real-time list and alerting on applications and network hardware. SIEM software matches events against rule based and analytics engines. It will then index them for sub-second search to detect and analyze advanced threats using globally gathered intelligence. This gives security teams both insight into and a track record of the activities within their IT environment by providing data analysis, event correlation, aggregation, reporting and log management.

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Server Monitoring

You want to make sure your servers are monitored. This is where most of the processing is done for your organization. But in today’s environment those servers could be in your data center, in the cloud, or the worse possible place under someone’s desk. Most monitoring systems will be able monitor systems. There may be some challenges with open firewalls to allow that type of traffic to be transferred. Most Monitoring systems use SNMP to monitor. There are other methods for of acquiring data for monitoring like SSH and WMI. These are typically  systems that run on  Linux or Windows.

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Don’t forget about monitoring alerts

So now that you are monitoring all of these devices, you want to make sure you receive the alerts. Most monitoring systems can send email, text messages, or even call you. While some corporations have a team of engineers that only focus monitoring, most companies have teams that balance monitoring with other job responsibilities. Having a dedicated team of engineers that monitor and manage the same types of technology is very beneficial. Some companies have generalized IT professionals. They may understand the technology, but not to the extent of some that specializes in that one technology.  Anexinet has a Managed Services department that has a Network Operation Center (NOC) that monitors our customer 24 hours a day. We employ specialists in desktop, server, virtualization and networking. If you are interested on how we can help please reach out to us.