Five Tips for Successful Network Management

Network management includes a variety of functions, which help to administrate computer systems with the aim to create reliable and stable networks. It includes strategies, tools, methods and operations. The importance of network management grows every year. According to the IT Priorities Survey, in 2013 only 39 percent of system engineers identified network management as a top concern. However, two years later, in 2015, this number increased to 44 percent.

It is not a surprise that network management becomes a top priority for more and more system administrators. Nowadays, networks are more complex than ever and they continue to develop very quickly. They cover very broad geographical areas and can be named truly borderless, especially with the development of cloud infrastructure such as Amazon Web Services.

Moving to the Successful Network Management

What means successful network management? First of all, network management tools allow you to ensure high performance and maximum availability for your website or application. IT professionals work toward it to optimize traffic and keep the environment safe and secure.

Take a look at these basic tips that will help you move in the right direction:

• Find a network monitoring tool. Just adopt an effective tool to prevent any security issues and to keep everything running smoothly. Monitoring will help you control outages and avoid them in an appropriate time. Moreover, with the traffic monitor, you will

  

  be able to see the best and worst performing routes for making decisions regarding further optimization.
• Move to the network automation. Everyone wants to get more results with less effort. This is a main idea of network automation: it helps to decrease human effort, leading to good network management. Thus, network automation is becoming a great DevOps strategy, helping to avoid repetitive tasks and prevent fat fingers.
• Balance your traffic wisely. Load balancers increase the capacity, reliability, and robustness of your service. It enables you to scale the application in real-time and re-route traffic during the traffic peaks. With load a balancing solution, you will be able to maximize availability by distributing network traffic across different servers and serving requests locally.
• Work on network performance optimization. It is a logical step after traffic monitoring. After the analysis, you always need to make some improvements. Network optimization solutions are designed specifically for that purpose and can be applied to cloud or bare metal infrastructure. Optimization involves traffic costs and performance improvement as well as activities to fix and even prevent any networking issues.
• Schedule regular maintenance. This involves a regular upgrade of network resources and equipment (for example, hardware such as routers, switchers, etc.), troubleshooting network problems, timely installation and configuration of software, planning for the future development and creating necessary documentation.

Conclusion 

Network Management is a complex task for IT professionals. However, with the help of the right tools, it can be made easier. Due to the continuous work in this direction, you will get the most value out of your infrastructure and will always be ahead of the curve.

About the Author

Tatiana Shchelkanogova is an experienced online editor and writer with a passion for the Internet and new technologies. She is currently working as an online marketing manager at Datapath.io.

Edited by Alicia Young