One of the most basic forms of
connection monitoring takes place every day on a network. The process
of users logging on to the network will verify that connections are
working properly or the networking department will soon be contacted.
This is not the most efficient or preferable method of connection
monitoring available. Simple programs are available that will allow
the administrator to enter a list of host IP addresses and these
addresses will be periodically pinged. If there is a connection
problem, the program will alert the administrator by the ping output.
This is a very inefficient and primitive way of monitoring the network
but it will work better that nothing at all. Another aspect of this
type of monitoring is that it only determines that somewhere between
the monitoring station and the target device there is a communication
breakdown. The fault could be a bad router, switch, network segment,
or the actual host might be down. The ping test only says that the
connection is down, not where it is down.
Checking all the hosts on a WAN using
this type of monitoring uses many resources. If the network has 3000
hosts on it, pinging all of the network devices and hosts can use a
great deal of system resources. A better way is to ping just a few of
the important hosts, servers, routers, and switches to verify their
connectivity. Ping tests will not give give true data unless
workstations are always left on. Again, this method of monitoring
should be used only if there is no other method available.
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