A practical approach to monitoring network redundancy

Abstract

Computer TCP/IP networks are becoming critical in all aspects of life. As computer networks continue to improve, the levels of redundancy continue to increase. Modern network redun-dancy features can be complex and expensive. This leads to misconfiguration of the redun-dancy features. Monitoring everything is not always practical. Some redundancy features are easy to detect while others are more difficult. It is common for redundancy features to fail or contribute to a failure scenario. Incorrectly configured redundancy will lead to network downtime when the network is supposed to be redundant. This presents a false sense of se-curity to the network operators and administrators. This research will present two scenarios that are commonly left unmonitored and look at a practical way to deploy solutions to these two scenarios in such a way that the network uptime can be improved. Implementing a practical approach to monitor and mitigate these types of failures allows costs spent on re-dundancy to increase uptime, and thus increase overall quality that is critical to a modern digital company.

Keywords

• practical network monitoring
• snmp
• network monitoring
• network performance
• network alerts
• interface redundancy monitoring