Network administration plays a crucial part in information technology for any scale of business. Managing, monitoring, and keeping a close watch on the network infrastructure is of the utmost importance to any organization. In a Windows network, desktops, servers, virtual servers, and virtual machines like Hyper-V run on the Windows operating system. It is critical to have a Windows network monitoring software or a tool to monitor the Windows servers and other critical systems' metrics, processes, performance counters, event logs, and services. By leveraging a reliable network monitor for Windows, businesses gain the ability to monitor the network health and efficiency of the Windows devices present in their network.
You'll need a Windows network monitoring tool for the following reasons:
Enterprise networks are usually enormous considering the traffic they handle and the businesses they cater to. They are often associated with a lot of devices, interfaces, processes, services, and other critical aspects, the disruption of which might result in catastrophe. Microsoft, being one of the most predominant vendors in the market, plays an indispensable role in all enterprise networks. Hence, the need to monitor Windows devices arises, which can be taken care of with the help of the right tool to monitor Windows networks. Choosing a Windows network monitoring software that aligns with your business needs and exhibits effortless scalability is of paramount importance.
With the right Windows monitoring tool, you can have increased visibility over your network devices. You can keep track of all the changes in your networks and stay on top of them. Increased visibility will keep you acquainted with the happenings in your network, which helps you prevent network outages.
An enterprise network that caters to a large business is complex owing to the dynamic load. Something as trivial as a faulty cable might lead to serious issues such as network outages and downtime. With a Windows network monitor, you can comprehensively monitor your network and spot and rectify faults immediately to prevent large-scale network issues.
With the dynamic constraints associated with a network rising rapidly, VMs are now more popular than ever. Microsoft Azure is one of the most predominant choices for VMs due to its scalability features and integration with other Microsoft tools. Hence the need to monitor Microsoft Azure and other VMs in your network along with the other physical entities arises. This is where a Windows network monitor comes in handy.
Enterprise networks are spread over a wide range of areas. Manual fault management will take more time and resources. Windows network monitoring tools allow you to manage faults remotely and take the action appropriate to you at the earliest thereby preventing network issues.
Networks today are becoming intelligent. Gone are the days when network admins would tackle issues once detected. The modern-day network complexity calls for not just post downtime reaction but a proactive monitoring process that allows them to detect and mitigate network issues even before happening. A Windows network monitor will provide such out-of-the-box monitoring and allow you to stay a step ahead of your network hassles.
The ultimate aim of network admins is to prevent network downtime and make sure the network devices are performing at their optimum capacity. A Windows network monitoring software allows you to prevent unplanned downtime and outages and lowers the network operating costs significantly.
Many software applications that run on Windows, run as Windows services in the background. These processes have no direct user interface and need no logged-on user (e.g. as a server). A few of these are critical services that keep the system functioning, and so ensuring that these services are running continuously is a key requirement for most system administrators. An effective Windows network monitor tool can help you monitor all these services running in the background on your Windows network devices.
OpManager provides Windows network monitoring features such as agentless Windows service monitoring using WMI which allows you to monitor Windows services either locally or across multiple servers on the network. You can also perform critical actions across remote locations automatically using OpManager.
Network monitoring for Windows plays a vital role in monitoring the performance and health of various processes within the Windows environment. Windows process monitor helps in monitoring a Windows process which is an instance of an executable program. An application can run several processes simultaneously. Processes end when an application is terminated, but a few processes run in the background. To analyze the load of system resources completely, it is important to understand the role of critical processes associated with the application or any process running on the server. Processes also affect the functioning of an application, and any error could cause the application to crash.
OpManager's process monitoring templates allow you to discover, manage, and set thresholds easily across multiple servers, from a single window. Remote process diagnostics allows administrators to view Top 10 processes by CPU or memory utilization and also provides the ability to terminate the problem-causing processes remotely. Apart from monitoring Windows networks, OpManager is also a real-time Linux network monitor and a tool that carries out Linux server monitoring efficiently.
Windows event log monitoring is critical to secure the Windows network from internal threats. The event logs contain the most important information for diagnosing application and operating system failures, determining the health and status of a system and verifying that the system and applications are operating properly. Windows event-log monitoring also helps in detecting events like failed logons, logon failures due to bad passwords, account lockouts, failed attempts to access secure files, security log tampering, etc.
OpManager's Windows event log monitoring provides several automatic rules to monitor critical security logs across all Windows servers and workstations in your network. It can also monitor applications, systems, and other event logs. OpManager allows you to monitor Windows event logs as part of an integrated network, server, and application management solution. It provides a set of about 50 pre-defined event log rules and you can assign appropriate severity and convert them into OpManager alarms.
Microsoft Exchange server is Microsoft's email and collaborative support platform deployed on the Windows server operating system for use within a business or larger enterprise. It is important to monitor the availability, RPC, and the database of Exchange servers. Maintaining the availability and uptime of Exchange servers is important to prevent delays of messages sent, malfunction of email servers, or loss of information.
OpManager's Exchange monitoring feature allows you to monitor the CPU, memory, and disk space of Exchange servers, the size of the Exchange database, and also view extensive details about the mailbox, specific to one or multiple users. Pre-defined monitors are available to monitor the various parameters of Exchange server monitoring. OpManager also enables you to set critical and warning threshold values to get instant alerts when any parameter exceeds the configured value. You can also generate performance reports of Exchange servers in real time using OpManager. OpManager, a Windows network monitor tool supports Exchange 2000/2003, Exchange 2007, Exchange 2010, Exchange 2013, and Exchange 2016.
In a Windows network, an Active directory is used to manage and store information related to network resources. Active Directory helps you to identify security and compliance risks. The processes in active directory monitoring include that of services, domain controller, and monitoring of critical processes. With effective AD monitoring, user performance issues can be rectified proactively and resource allocation can also be optimized. Incorporating a Windows network monitor software to monitor your active directory can help you provide quality services, and reduce network downtime in your Windows enterprise network.
OpManager automatically maps active directory monitors to the related servers and monitors the AD environment for performance and availability. Using OpManager, you can monitor the active directory services, performance, domain controller roles, and AD processes. Parameters monitored include CPU Usage, Physical RAM, File Reads, File Writes, Cache Hits, etc. You can also monitor critical network counters like Connected Users, LDAP Client Sessions, & LDAP Bind Time as well as performance counters like NTLM Authentication, Kerberos Authentication & LDAP Searches. OpManager also offers an intuitive dashboard that gives you an overall picture of your active directory health at a glance.
Database servers are critical to business, and maintaining their availability is a basic necessity. Windows MSSQL monitoring helps maintain the performance, and availability and also in monitoring the database for active transactions, database size, log files used, log cache hit ratio, and transactions per second.
Windows network monitoring tool helps you to monitor Windows servers. With OpManager's MSSQL monitoring, you can detect and pinpoint the exact point of failure to make sure the MSSQL server is up and running. OpManagers MSSQL database monitor counters include 'Data Files size', 'Log files used percentage', 'Active Transactions', 'Log growths and shrinks', 'Log files free size', 'Log Cache hit ratio', etc. OpManager's MSSQL monitor's lock-related monitors help in identifying the locks causing transaction delays so that you can investigate further and find out the cause. Other performance metrics monitored include buffer monitors, cache monitors, & memory monitors. OpManager's Windows server network monitor will help you stay on top of your Windows network.
Network monitoring tools for Windows such as OpManager simplify Windows monitoring by providing a customizable dashboard that can display the performance stats of your Windows devices across the network. OpManager's dashboard plays a critical role in Windows network management by displaying all critical metrics by using widgets. The dashboard can also be set up as a NOC view.
