Network monitoring solutions are great for monitoring WAN link status and utilization, device and service reachability, and CPU utilization and free disk space on servers.
However, they do a terrible job when it comes to troubleshooting.
Example
A single half-duplex interface or bad cable hidden somewhere in the network can cause issues for users, and monitoring software can’t help locate or solve the problem.
This limitation arises from the fact that monitoring is a different activity than troubleshooting.
Monitoring solutions are focused on tracking the current status of the environment and alerting if that status changes, or alerting if a resource gets low, like bandwidth or disk space.
Limitation
Monitoring software is blind to network issues that arise from individual packet loss.
Troubleshooting requires looking at configuration information, error counters, queueing, and performance indicators on involved switches, routers, and interfaces.
All this information must be collected, correlated, and analyzed to determine the root-cause fault. Additionally, if the problem is transient and isn’t happening when this information is collected, this effort might be wasted.
Example
If a user complains about a poor quality VoIP call that happened 20 minutes ago, but everything is fine now, monitoring software can’t help.
In a perfect world, you would want to have a historical perspective of this information so you could see what was happening on the network at the time of the event.
Many enterprises recognize the need for a dedicated troubleshooting solution to work alongside of a monitoring solution to make problem solving easy and avoid lengthy service impairments.
PathSolutions TotalView is built to make troubleshooting easy, filling the gaps network monitoring solutions miss.
Click here to download the Fact Sheet in standard PDF format.
