Cisco Network Monitoring Best Practices

Cisco is an American company known around the globe for manufacturing and selling networking software, hardware, tech services, and telecommunications equipment. 

In the business world, communication is key—and since Cisco is the leading player in the telecommunications sphere, it’s more than likely your business uses some of their services or products.

In an ideal world, your business’s Cisco network would run smoothly at all times. But this isn’t reality. Downtimes and outages are bound to occur—but by following these Cisco network monitoring best practices, you can optimise your network and troubleshoot problems with ease.

1. Measure metrics that matter

Networking monitoring is vital for managing downtimes and improving communication—but only when you monitor and measure the right metrics. There’s no use wasting time on gathering irrelevant information. Stick to the metrics that matter!

Some crucial metrics and KPIs to keep an eye on include:

• Network performance metrics, such as availability, connectivity, and packet loss
• Application metrics, such as error rate, request rate, response time, and failure rate
• Host metrics, such as memory, disk, and CPU usage on an individual machine
• Network anomalies, i.e. identifying when KPIs are outside of normal ranges

By measuring metrics that matter to your business, you can quickly resolve issues, make intelligent predictions and discover hidden trends.

When measuring these KPIs and metrics, you should also consider how long you should store the data and the appropriate period to measure. For example, if you measure an extensive period, you could obscure some performance issues.

2. Implement Cisco NetFlow

Cisco NetFlow is a set of services intended for IP applications. These services include network planning, security, usage-based billing, traffic accounting, and general network monitoring.

B implementing NetFlow, you can gather invaluable insights about your network’s applications and users. You can also measure important metrics like peak usage times and traffic statistics. 

Some traffic statistics worth monitoring include:

• Destination and source IP addresses
• Packets and bytes in the flow
• Output and input interface numbers

3. Maintain tight security

It’s best to use insights gathered through network monitoring to bolster your security protocols. Through consistent measuring and monitoring, you can gain a clear understanding of what’s normal and expected in your business’s day-to-day network operations. You can also identify seasonal trends.

With this data in mind, your business can quickly identify unusual activity, like a sudden and unexplained jump in network traffic. When your administrators can detect issues quickly—or even predict them—it’s easy to resolve them and determine if a security threat has occurred.

4. Get ready for the future

The world of telecommunications and technology is always changing. It’s essential to plan for and predict future changes to keep your business afloat.

Monitoring network performance and measuring key metrics can help you prepare for the future. Rather than taking guesses, you can make educated inferences about upcoming updates based on past data.

As such, it’s important to store critical metrics for reference at a later date.

Conclusion

Monitoring your Cisco networks is critical for keeping your telecommunications systems running smoothly. By following the best practices listed above, you can minimise downtime and boost performance to unprecedented levels.