Tips on Assessing the Health of Your Network

Most people only regard  bandwidth and latency as the health of a network. They don’t realize the importance of security and loads on servers. Viruses and bugs decrease the quality of your network. High load on servers can lead to high response time or sometimes poor internet speed.

First thing you should analyze is the workload on the workstations/servers.  Use an Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) monitoring system to help you monitor and manage your network resources. SNMP is a secure network management system which delivers real-time monitoring for your entire network infrastructure. Its objectives are:

• To find the highest traffic links
• To identify protocol errors
• To provide diagnosis of specific problems
• To describe the system’s configuration

It allows the administrator to free resources at time of need. This non-invasive tool automatically discovers all active IP addresses and monitors all devices and services in the network such as WAN Links, Servers and Applications.

After assessing the health of your workstations/servers you need to check security. If you already have an antivirus installed then you should make sure that it has been updated with the latest antivirus database. Do the same thing in case of a firewall.  If you don’t have an antivirus or a firewall you should get one ASAP.

The IP address listing function allows maximum resources available to the users of the network by restricting unauthorized access to the network. This allows users to connect to the network using IPs allowed by the administrator. For example if the network has 50 users then the IPs will start from 192.168.1.1 to 192.168.1.50. If a new user wants to join he/she will have to ask the administrator to make an IP available for him/her.

Now comes the identification of weak links. Weak links can be identified simply by using speed testing software. Here are some steps that will guide you:

1. Search for Local Area Network (LAN) speed testing software
2. Download  recommended speed testing software to get accurate results
3. Run it and let it complete
4. If your link speed is 100Mbps, then you should get a transfer rate around 11MB per second to show your network is healthy

Anything less than 7MB per second and you should be checking your wiring. If you want to check the speed of your internet connection you should do the same, except now search for internet speed. Also your transfer rate will be different, if you have a 10Mbps connection you will get a speed around 1.1Mbs per second.  To save time you can also use the SNMP to test connection speeds with all the computers on the server.

Regular check-ups are an excellent idea for all of us. Your network is no exception. That is why Thrive offers comprehensive Network Health Assessments to evaluate the performance and sustainability or your technology infrastructure. For more information on all of our IT services, please contact Thrive Networks today.