If you don’t know what normal performance looks like, you’ll never recognize abnormal. Baseline your key metrics—latency, bandwidth utilization, error rates, CPU usage, routing table size, and application response times. When something drifts from that baseline, you’ll know instantly that something’s wrong.
2. Where Your Critical Paths AreYou should know exactly which links, routers, and services form the critical paths for your business traffic. When an outage hits, the first question isn’t “what broke?”—it’s “what does this affect?” Knowing your network’s critical paths lets you prioritize your response intelligently.
3. Every Device’s Role and OwnershipYou’d be surprised how many organizations can’t say who owns or maintains a given switch or firewall. Maintain an updated inventory that includes device purpose, IP, serial, OS version, and who’s responsible for it. Ownership clarity saves hours when you’re troubleshooting at 2 AM.
4. Where Your Bottlenecks AreEvery network has choke points—uplinks, WAN edges, or underpowered firewalls. You should know where yours are before they cause slowdowns. Continuous performance monitoring helps you identify and fix them proactively.
5. How Traffic Actually FlowsNetwork diagrams are one thing; actual data flow is another. Use flow analysis tools or packet captures to confirm how traffic moves between segments, data centers, and the cloud. Routing asymmetry, NAT, or policy-based routing can create hidden problems you’ll only uncover by seeing real flows.
6. Where Your Data Lives—and Who Can Reach ItWith hybrid environments and SaaS sprawl, data lives everywhere. Know where sensitive data resides, what segments it traverses, and what security controls protect it. This isn’t just a compliance issue—it’s core to reducing blast radius during incidents.
7. How Well Your Redundancy Actually WorksRedundancy diagrams look beautiful on PowerPoint, but failover doesn’t always behave as expected. Test it. Simulate link failures, device reboots, and path losses. If failover doesn’t work under pressure, you don’t have redundancy—you have a false sense of security.
8. How to Get Visibility, FastWhen an outage hits, you need to know:
The middle of an outage is the worst time to realize your monitoring system doesn’t have the data you need. Know your tools and make sure they’re collecting the right metrics.
9. Your Configuration Management ProcessYou should always know what changed, when, and by whom. Automated configuration backups and version tracking can save your network—and your weekend. Most outages come down to configuration drift, not hardware failure.
10. Your Recovery PlanIf the core switch dies or the edge router loses its config, can you recover fast? Keep offline backups, documented procedures, and tested restore workflows. Disaster recovery isn’t just about servers—it’s about the infrastructure that connects them.
💡 Bonus Tip:
Know where your blind spots are.
Even the best networks have areas that aren’t fully monitored or documented. Admitting that—and actively working to close those gaps—is the mark of a mature network team.