What is Network Management?

Network management is the process of monitoring and managing an entire network through a holistic network management software. This network management platform has to be competent enough to perform every network management task in between rationing resources to enhancing security.

With IT networks scaling across wired, wireless, and virtual environments, network management only becomes increasingly complex putting network administrators in need of all the help they can get. With a myriad of network management solutions available in the IT market, it is important to zero in on the right one. Among these various network management solutions available, a reliable and effective network management solution needn't necessarily take up a huge chuck of your budget. A robust, secure, yet an affordable network management solution is your best bet to streamline network management.

Network Management

Six critical aspects every network management tool should address

Since the options to choose a best network management software for your organization is endless, here is a quick checklist for you to help make your decisions better. The tool should be integrated enough to help you administrate, operate, maintain, provision, automate and secure your entire network infrastructure effectively. Choosing the right real-time network management software is revolutionary in your monitoring game.

Network Performance Management

For all network software, performance management involves troubleshooting faults either through a manual or automated approach so that the network performance is restored to its original or improved condition. For this task, network admins rely on real-time network management solutions like OpManager. This network manager software's real-time network management offers basic and advanced network management services to fix faults that degrade network performance. The huge list of performance monitors in OpManager helps you instantly add your device into its monitoring console and begins monitoring. Now, let's see how OpManager's network management tool troubleshoots network faults.

Inbuilt tools

OpManager, the network monitoring software, offers a variety of tools such as ping, traceroute, MIB browser, remote control, and more to troubleshoot basic performance issues.

Network Configuration Management

OpManager includes a network configuration management module to manage configuration changes. With this, it is easier to automate configuration backups, adhere to compliance policies, and detect network changes in real time.

Network Assessment Tool

It helps you check if your IT infrastructure is aligned with the business goals and helps in framing a reliable network management strategy. Analyze the top network management tools and you will understand why OpManager stands out matching your expectations.

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Network Provisioning

An important aspect of network management is network provisioning. Every network monitor must have network provisioning which involves calculating the load handled by the network and future demands based on the current network trend. It also involves keeping resources in reserve so that when a need arises, it becomes easier to handle. A network control software would enable you to identify network trends and provision your network. Manage your resources effetively with OpManager's network management service. 

Capacity Planning Reports

OpManager is pre built with 150+ network management reports that provide information on device upgrades, bandwidth usage, disk & memory utilization etc. These reports help in identifying network trends and assist in resource allocation.

IP Address and Switch Port Management

OpManager's IP address & switch port management console, helps in managing IP addresses and switch ports for space and availability. OpManager tackles IP and switch port conflicts, audits user access and provides prompt notifications on status changes.

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Fault identification in network management platform

The biggest challenge with today's networking management tools, is to proactively identify faults before it impact end-users. Among numerous network monitoring tools, ManageEngine OpManager, a trusted network management system, detects, isolates and troubleshoots faults, raises alarms to remediate faults quickly. With ManageEngine OpManager, the integrated network management software, you can monitor the performance, availability and health of all your network devices. This network management system uses the SNMP/WMI/CLI network protocols to fetch performance data from network devices. This data is then displayed to the end user on the network control system i.e on the management tool's web console.

Using OpManager network management solution you can:
  • Set multiple thresholds for performance metrics.
  • Stay ahead of network issues with the network manager tool's adaptive threshold based alerts.
  • Keep an eye on monitored metrics with the network management dashboard.
  • Get proactively notified for threshold violations and faults through email and SMS.
  • Process SNMP traps and syslogs and raise alerts based on threshold set on the networking management software.
  • Automatically log alarms as tickets into a service desk software.
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Maintaining QoS in network management

It is common for network performance to degrade as years pass by. Therefore, it is essential to deliver quality IT services to end-users meet the SLA month on month. OpManager, the automated network management tool helps you adhere to service level agreements and achieves 99.9% availability for your network and business critical applications. With business level dashboards, it is possible to detect the factors affecting your business in real time. 

Real-Time Network Management Software - ManageEngine OpManager

Fortified network security with a versatile network management software

Today's network monitoring tools are equipped with AI - ML based smart alerting engine. However, when it comes to security, extra efforts must be taken to detect and prevent breaches much before, to help the user with a seamless network experience. Analyzing the network device activity logs and monitoring the network bandwidth should potentially expose any suspicious network activity. This is how ManageEngine OpManager deals with network security.

Firewall Security Management

OpManager's Firewall Analyzer add on helps gain insights on network attacks and security breaches. Not just that, it helps with real-time monitoring of VPN, and proxy servers.

NetFlow Bandwidth Management

Perform bandwidth monitoring and network traffic analysis with OpManager's NetFlow Analyzer add-on. Get real time visibility into the network and be able to efficiently collect and analyze network bandwidth leveraging flow technologies.

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Workflows in network management

Enterprise network management involves on-demand and scheduled tasks such as testing network faults, executing backup scripts etc. Most of these network management tasks are repetitive and time consuming. Automating such tasks will help admins and technicians save a lot of time and effort. Automated network management also helps you reduce your workforce and enable implementation of simple automated troubleshooting techniques for your network.

For example, whenever you get a device down alarm, you will ping the device and do a traceroute to know if there is any packet loss, where exactly it is happening or if the device is actually down. These repetitive tasks can be automated with workflows.OpManager, the trusted network management and monitoring tool supports around 80 actions that can be automated with workflows .

Some of the network management tasks handled by OpManager workflows include:
  • Automatically stop/restart a service or a process.
  • Shutdown/restart/suspend a VM.
  • Execute scripts and verify its output.
  • Backup network configurations automatically.
  • Detect the last changes done on a network device.
workflows

Extend the capabilities of ManageEngine OpManager by enabling add-ons. Monitor your network holistically based on your network monitoring needs.

In-depth network traffic analysis with real-time bandwidth usage monitoring (flow-based). Traffic reports help with capacity planning and identifying top talkers in the network.

Effectively manage and monitor firewall logs, manage compliance in your firewall devices, and optimize your firewall rules based on its usage with this add-on.

Monitor the availability and performance of both network devices, and the entire application tier using a single web console.

Automate policy-based changes, configuration, and compliance on your network devices and completely eliminate manual configuration errors.

Get a holistic view of IP addresses, IP computer objects information, MAC address list, VLAN information, switch ports status & much more with this integration.

FAQs on Network Management

  • What is network management?

    Network management is the process of managing a network for fault and performance using various tools and technologies to keep up with the business requirements. The objective of network management is to achieve an error free network. In today's environment, multiple network monitoring solutions, network monitoring tools or network management tools are employed making the whole process a complex one.

  • Why do we need network management software?

    Enterprise network management solutions play an important role in ensuring that an organization's IT infrastructure is available and without any issues. This network management software helps monitor and manage the four critical aspects of the IT infrastructure such as, fault identification, performance management, network provisioning, and maintaining QoS.

  • What are network management solutions?

    Network management solutions help network admins to gain a comprehensive view into their network resources such as routers, servers, and access points. They help network admins in monitoring, inspecting, and troubleshooting these resources to ensure constant network uptime and reduce network faults. This is aided by the network management solution's ability to alert users on network issues, and generate maintain network QoS.

  • What are network management tools?

    Network management tools assemble every networking component together ensuring effective communication between them. A potent tool helps you visualize the whole network, giving a clear insight on traffic within the environment.

  • How does network management tool work?

    A good network management tool monitors, configures, manages, administers, secures and on the whole simplifies the job of monitoring easy for the network admin. It helps troubleshoot the network devices and keeps the health of the network in check. This tool sends a signal called ping to each of the device ports and picks up the required information.

Loved by customers all over the world

 

“Easy Implementation, Excellent support & Lower Cost Tool - Team Lead, IT Services Industry”

Reviewer Role: Infrastructure and Operations

Company size: 500M - 1B USD

We have been using OpManager since 2011 and our overall experience has been excellent. The tool plays a vital role in providing the value to our organization and to the customers we are supporting. The support is excellent and staff takes full responsibilities in resolving the issues. Innovation is never stopping and clearly visible with newer versions.

“OpManager - 10 steps ahead of the competition, one step away from being unequaled - Network Services Manager, Government Organization”

Reviewer Role: Infrastructure and Operations

Company size: 5,000 - 50,000 Employees

I have a long standing relationship with ManageEngine. OpManager has always missed one or two features that would make it truly the best tool on the market, but over it is the most comprehensive and easy to use the product on the market.

“Easy Implementation with a feature rich catalogue, support has some room for improvement - NOC Manager, IT Services Industry”

Reviewer Role: Program and Portfolio Management

Company size: 500M - 1B USD

The vendor has been supportive during the implementation & POC phases providing trial licenses. Feature requests and feedbacks is usually acted upon swiftly. There was sufficient vendor support during the implementation phase. After deployment, the support is more than adequate, where the vendor could make some improvements.

“Great Monitoring tool - CIO in Finance Industry”

Reviewer Role: CIO

Company size: 1B - 3B USD

ManageEngine provides a suite of tools that have made improvements to the availability of our internal applications. From monitoring, management and alerting, we have been able to peak performance within our data center.

“Simple Implementation, Easy To Use. Very Intuitive. - Principle Engineer in IT Services”

Reviewer Role: Enterprise Architecture and Technology Innovation

Company size: 250M - 500M USD

 

ManageEngine support was responsive to all our queries.

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Altaleb Alshenqiti

“OpManager helps me monitor all aspects of the data-center and equipment like servers, switches and routers. It is fast, intuitive and centralized and you do not need to be an expert to deal with OpManager.”

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Donald Stewart

“Donald Stewart, IT Manager of Crest Industries is happy with ManageEngine OpManager for its end-to-end network monitoring software. It is easy-to-use and offers fault and performance management for router.”

Donald Stewart

IT Manager, Crest Industries

John Rosser

“John Rosser, MIS Manager of Yale Chase talks about the proactive nature of ManageEngine OpManager & how his organisation gained value from it.”

John Rosser

MIS Manager

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