Router monitoring involves managing the router network as a whole where the performance, health, security and availability of the router is continuously monitored to ensure better operation and minimal downtime. Routers are basic connecting components of the network and hence it is crucial to monitor routers from time to time. Let's read why router monitoring is essential to enterprises, challenges encountered, features of a good router monitoring tool and much more.
Routers direct traffic across internal and external networks, making them critical to both performance and security. Monitoring ensures that routing paths are optimal and devices aren’t misconfigured or overloaded—preventing performance bottlenecks and downtime.
Compromised routers are a common vector for cyberattacks (e.g., DDoS amplification, rogue firmware). Proactive router monitoring can detect anomalous behavior like unusual port activity or bandwidth spikes—helping security teams act before threats escalate.
Enterprise users often share frustration when productivity tools like Microsoft 365 or VoIP services slow down. In many cases, unmonitored routers with poor QoS settings or saturated links are to blame. Monitoring helps detect when link saturation or incorrect routing causes delays.
As business traffic grows (especially video, collaboration apps, and cloud access), IT must know when routers or WAN links are nearing capacity. Historical trend data from router monitoring tools allows for informed decisions about scaling or redesigning the network.
Router issues that go unnoticed can cause prolonged outages, violating SLAs and affecting mission-critical operations. Monitoring router availability, error rates, and interface health reduces mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to repair (MTTR).
Unnoticed outdated firmware or misconfigurations on routers lead to major vulnerabilities. Router monitoring tools that integrate with configuration management help maintain compliance and prevent downtime from incorrect changes.
With more users accessing networks remotely or via VPNs, edge routers are under increased strain. Monitoring ensures these endpoints don’t become chokepoints or security gaps in a hybrid work setup.
WAN links and the routers that serve them are usually the most expensive part of the network, and managing bandwidth allocation can be complex. Over-subscribing to bandwidth could mean that the company is paying for more bandwidth than required and under-subscribing could result in congestion and unacceptable network performance.
WAN monitoring and router monitoring thus become critical to not just day-to-day productivity but also to a company's bottom-line. Network managers will need to optimize the quality of service by balancing throughput, committed information rate (CIR) and burst rate with congestion, response time, and discards.
Managing and monitoring routers within enterprise WANs is increasingly complex, especially as organizations adopt hybrid cloud models, remote work, and multi-ISP strategies.This complexity introduces significant challenges that can impact network performance, security, and operational efficiency.
Consider a multinational company with branch offices across various regions.To ensure continuous connectivity, each branch employs a dual-WAN setup, combining MPLS and broadband connections.The goal is to achieve load balancing and automatic failover. However, in the absence of effective router and WAN monitoring:
Bandwidth allocation optimization: Misjudging bandwidth needs can lead to either over-provisioning (wasting cost) or under-provisioning (causing congestion). Monitoring tools must help balance utilization with actual demand per link.
High network availability and redundancy: WAN links are often a single point of failure in branch connectivity. Monitoring must ensure uptime through redundancy checks, failover testing, and SLA compliance.
Rapid resolution of WAN issues: Latency spikes, packet loss, or link failures can severely impact real-time services. Admins need real-time alerts, diagnostic tools (like traceroute/hop analysis), and historical data to resolve WAN issues quickly.
Capacity planning for future needs: As usage grows due to cloud adoption, video conferencing, or remote work, it’s critical to identify trends and forecast when upgrades will be needed.
Cost management of recurring link expenses: MPLS and leased lines are expensive. Monitoring can reveal underutilized links, helping justify cost optimization or transitions to SD-WAN/internet-based links.
Identifying high traffic sources and patterns: Visibility into top talkers (users or apps), traffic spikes, and protocol types is essential. Integrations with flow analysis tools like NetFlow/sFlow provide detailed usage insights.
Spotting and replacing problematic legacy routers: Older routers with limited memory, CPU, or outdated firmware often fail under modern traffic loads. Monitoring must track device performance (CPU, memory, CRC errors, discards) and flag anomalies early.
Limited visibility across hybrid environments: Traditional NMS tools struggle with end-to-end visibility in hybrid WANs that span MPLS, cloud, and broadband connections. Advanced monitoring must bridge this gap.
Multi-vendor configuration management: Maintaining consistent router configurations across different vendors and models increases the risk of misconfigurations. Monitoring should integrate with config tools to push changes and validate setups.
Inconsistent SLA metrics from ISPs: Each service provider defines performance metrics differently. A monitoring solution must normalize this data to allow fair comparisons and SLA verifications.
Security across public and private links: With more WAN traffic moving over public internet (via SD-WAN), encryption, anomaly detection, and firewall monitoring must be part of router/WAN monitoring strategies.
Troubleshooting complexity: Diagnosing whether a slow application is due to routing issues, ISP problems, or local LAN conditions requires correlated data across layers—routing tables, link stats, and app performance.
Vendor and ISP coordination: Multiple circuits across geographies mean more SLAs, contracts, and escalations. Monitoring tools that track per-link history and outages help streamline provider accountability.
To overcome these challenges, organizations should:
By proactively addressing these areas, organizations can enhance their router and WAN monitoring strategies, leading to improved network performance, security, and user satisfaction
OpManager is a highly integrated network monitoring software that has inherent capability to monitor routers and WAN links efficiently. Monitor any network device like routers, switches, firewalls, servers, VMs, printers, load balancers, wireless LAN controllers, storage devices and any other device that is able to connect to the network through an IP.
OpManager monitors your WAN links' bandwidth, utilization, errors, discards and thus helps you verify service level agreements (SLAs) with your Internet Service Providers (ISPs). By presenting accurate information on traffic and utilization for every link in your WAN, you can identify highly utilized and under-utilized links allowing you to optimize bandwidth allocation across links.
By proactively monitoring link latency & link errors and assigning threshold alerts to these, you can identify degradations early and avoid costly downtime. And what's worse than your links going down? Not knowing that they are! OpManager alerts you whenever a link goes down. Alerts can be sent as emails or text messages which contain details on thresholds breached and relevant link details eg. the "circuit ID" which allow the administrator to pinpoint unavailable links quickly.
OpManager's reporting functionality also provides you with a detailed availability report of all your interfaces. You can use these reports to cross-check whether your SLAs are being met.
With OpManager you can create business views (maps) to graphically visualize your entire WAN. You now gain complete visibility on your WAN links and track outages to the hop level. Apart from your infrastructure, WAN performance depends very much on the ISPs you subscribe to for the WAN service. OpManager provides insights on your WAN link performance by displaying hop-wise latency count from which you can identify whether the problem resides in your infrastructure or with the ISP's.
OpManager helps network managers save on monthly recurring costs by identifying under-utilized links. Armed with historical traffic trend charts and link utilization reports, network managers can also plan for additional capacity well in advance. If you are seeing abnormally high traffic / utilization, you can now find out why. Get detailed traffic analysis in OpManager by integrating it with ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer. Know which users or applications are using your bandwidth and see who the top talkers are.
OpManager helps track various parameters via the following router monitors
Also using OpManager's custom SNMP monitors, you can monitor several other critical performance metrics provided by your router vendor.
OpManager helps you to quickly identify unusual behavior/performance in your routers and logs these as events. You can now list down troublesome routers which need upgrade/update/replacement.
You can also push any change or configuration to multiple routers easily by integrating OpManager with ManageEngine Network Configuration Manager.
WAN monitoring
Router Interface Reports
Router performance monitoring
WAN Latency monitoring
WAN Link availability
The groups feature helps simplify network management by allowing network administrators to categorize devices and interfaces where pushing bulk configurations to a large number of devices simultaneously.
OpManager empowers you to set up alerts that activate upon detecting faults. This gives you the freedom to automate corrections or alert administrators. The notification profile allows you to customize communication channels, receiving alerts through Email, Slack, webhooks, and more, or creating tickets in ticketing applications such as SDP, Jira etc.
OpManager is designed to work seamlessly across a wide range of networking environments, offering extensive compatibility with industry-leading router vendors and communication protocols. Whether you're managing a small branch network or a globally distributed infrastructure, OpManager ensures robust and continuous monitoring of your router ecosystem.
OpManager supports monitoring of routers from virtually any vendor that complies with standard network management protocols. If your router supports SNMP, WMI, or CLI-based access, OpManager can monitor it- no matter the brand.
Popular router vendors supported include:
Whether it’s a core router in your data center or a branch-level edge router, OpManager can automatically discover, classify, and monitor it—providing real-time insights into its performance and availability.
OpManager leverages a combination of powerful network management protocols to ensure comprehensive router monitoring:
SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol): The backbone of device monitoring in OpManager. SNMP (v1, v2c, v3) is used to collect vital metrics like CPU usage, interface throughput, memory utilization, packet loss, and more from routers.
ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol): Used for basic availability and latency checks. ICMP pings help determine whether the router is reachable and how quickly it responds, aiding in real-time fault detection.
CLI (Telnet/SSH): For deeper diagnostics and configuration-level checks, OpManager supports CLI-based access using Telnet or SSH. This is especially useful when integrated with ManageEngine Network Configuration Manager to push changes or collect config backups from routers.
WMI (Windoes Management Instrumentation): Applied for Windows-based routers or interfaces to gather performance statistics where SNMP is not used.
Flow Technologies (via integration with NetFlow Analyzer): Protocols like NetFlow, sFlow, jFlow, and IPFIX provide deep traffic-level visibility when routers are exporting flow data. This allows administrators to monitor top talkers, bandwidth hogs, and application-specific usage across WAN links.
These metrics are retrieved primarily via SNMP and CLI (Telnet/SSH) and can be displayed in real-time dashboards, historical trend charts, and threshold-based alert systems.
OpManager makes it easy to discover, classify, and monitor routers using an agentless setup. Here’s a step-by-step summary of the implementation process:
1. Discover devices: Use the Discovery Wizard to scan your IP range or import devices using a CSV. OpManager auto-identifies devices (routers, switches, etc.) via SNMP and classifies them.
2. Enable SNMP access on routers: Ensure SNMP (v1/v2c/v3) is enabled and configured on your routers. Provide SNMP credentials in OpManager under Settings > Discovery > Credentials.
3. Apply monitoring templates: Apply router-specific performance templates which include predefined monitors for CPU, memory, traffic, etc. You can also create Custom SNMP Monitors for vendor-specific OIDs.
4. Set thresholds and alerts: Configure threshold-based alerts (e.g., CPU > 80%, Packet errors > 5%) for each performance metric. Assign notification profiles to receive alerts via email, SMS, Slack, or integrated ticketing tools.
5. Visualize performance: Use dashboards, business views, and heat maps to visualize router health and link status. Set up real-time dashboards or NOC views for continuous monitoring.
6. Generate reports: Use built-in reports like Availability Reports, Interface Utilization, Top N Routers by Traffic, and more. Schedule automatic report generation for audits and SLA tracking.
7. Automate response and integration: Use Workflows to automate responses (e.g., restart an interface) upon certain alerts. Integrate with tools like Network Configuration Manager to push updates or backup configurations.
To learn more about router monitoring and how it can help manage your network better, take a free personalized demo or download a free, 30-day trial today.
More than 1,000,000 IT admins trust ManageEngine ITOM solutions to monitor their IT infrastructure securely
Features
Training and Support
