Network monitoring is a common IT term that has a broad implication. Network monitoring can refer to the practice, techniques, and tools used to provide insight into the status of a network. These techniques are used to monitor the availability and performance of networked systems and troubleshoot problems.
Some reasons you may want to practice network monitoring include the following:
- To detect the reachability of networked systems
- To measure the availability of networked systems
- To determine the performance of networked systems
- To inform decisions about network resource allocation
- To aid in troubleshooting
- To benchmark performance
- To reverse engineer a protocol
- To debug a program
In this chapter, we look at a small subset of conventional network monitoring techniques that may be useful when implementing networked programs.
When developing or deploying networked programs, it is often the case that you run into problems. When this happens, you are faced with two possibilities...