Question

As a network manager in a medium-size corporation, it is your responsibility to use a proactive approach to providing security to your network.

• Evaluate 2 network monitoring technologies.
  • These should be able to provide you with a graphical look at your network nodes and layout. These technologies should both offer an alert mechanism that is included in the package.
• State some advantages and disadvantages of each.
• Compare the costs of each.

This information will need to be presented to your Vice President and CIO so that funding can be provided to implement one of the solutions you are recommending.

• For each technology, create a 6-slide PowerPoint presentation (12 slides total).
  • Input the information you have found on each solution.
  • Include any information that you think will be useful in helping them understand the importance of proactive network management and monitoring and how it plays a key role in maintaining a stable operating environment.

Answer 1

Before we compare the two networks on the basis of proactive approach, let me explain the meaning of PROACTIVE and PROACTIVE NETWORK MANAGEMENT & MONITORING.

Meaning of PROACTIVE:

Action and result oriented behavior, instead of the one that waits for things to happen and then tries to adjust (react) to them. Proactive behavior aims at identification and exploitation of opportunities and in taking action against potential problems and threats before it actually takes place, whereas reactive behavior focuses on fighting a fire or solving a problem after it occurs.

Meaning of  PROACTIVE NETWORK MANAGEMENT & MONITORING:

Proactive monitoring used in information technology allows teams to understand how services are performing, along with identifying potential areas of risk 24 x 7. Monitoring can apply to applications, networks, security, computers and data centers. Operationally, proactive monitoring provides a view into the health and status of IT services. Like air traffic controllers, IT staff members use monitoring tools to see network traffic and plan actions to avoid potential problems. They can act proactively while using the tools to benchmark performance.

Now, I am attaching the screenshots of the powerpoint slides as asked by you:

Solarwinds Overview & Features:

PRTG Overview & Features:

COMPARISION ON THE BASIS OF THE PRICING OF THE PRTG AND SOLARWINDS:

The pricing varies a bit for the more comprehensive versions of the application, with 500 sensors costing around $1600, and the top of the range package with unlimited sensors costing $60,000.

SolarWinds NPM pricing starts at $2,955*; SolarWinds NCM pricing starts at $2,895*; SolarWinds IPAM pricing starts at $1,995*; SolarWinds NTA pricing starts at $1,915*; and SolarWinds VNQM pricing starts at $1,615*

ADVANTAGE OF PRTG:

• Avoid performance bottlenecks and proactively deliver better quality of service.
• Reduce costs by buying according to needs and increase profits by minimising downtime.
• Find peace of mind: No alarms from PRTG means that everything is running fine.
• Single Page Application web interface. All object setting dialogues are shown as pop-up layers, so you never lose the current context when changing the tag of an object or adding a notification trigger.

ADVANTAGE OF SOLARWINDS:

• Multi-vendor network monitoring.
• Advanced alerting.
• Critical path visualization with NetPath.
• PerfStack performance analysis dashboard.
• Complex Device Monitoring with Network Insight.
• Intelligent Mapping with Orion Maps.
• SDN monitoring with Cisco ACI support.
• Wireless network monitoring and management.
• Network performance baselines.
• Smarter scalability for robust networks.

DISADVANTAGE OF PRTG:

A paid product.

Works only in Microsoft Windows environment, which increases a cost of this solution on one license.

DISADVANTAGE OF SOLARWINDS:

• It takes 3 min of time to trigger the device down mail alert.
• Difficult to setup initially, UI is abit intimidating at first .
• The element base pricing is very expensive, can quickly escalate.
• Older versions we're lacking support for many devices. Fixed with recent updates.

NOTE:

SOURCE of images used for the explanation of the problem is observed and downloaded from google.