Enterprise networks are huge and complex, with infrastructure hosted in many different facilities across a wide geographic area. Though most network infrastructure isn’t housed in the same location as the core business, it’s still vital to the business’s continual operation. Remote site monitoring gives network admins a virtual presence in remote sites like data centers, manufacturing facilities, electrical substations, water treatment plants, and oil pipelines.
Most organizations already have some form of remote infrastructure monitoring, but traditional solutions come with major limitations that make it difficult for networking teams to maintain 24/7 uptime. In this blog, we’ll discuss the importance of remote site monitoring, analyze the limitations of traditional solutions, and explain how the ideal remote monitoring platform improves network resilience.
The importance of remote site monitoring
Many organizations have reduced their IT staff due to the economic recession, leaving networking and infrastructure teams stretched too thin. When there aren’t enough eyes on remote infrastructure, enterprise networks are more vulnerable to breaches, hardware failures, and other major causes of network outages. With the average cost of downtime rising above $100k in 2022, and cyberattacks causing major disruptions to oil pipelines in recent years, this is a problem that’s too expensive to ignore.
The limitations of traditional remote site monitoring solutions
Many organizations rely on remote site monitoring solutions that are fragmented and vendor-specific. Admins have to log in to one platform to view monitoring data for a remote site’s wireless access points, for example, and a different platform to monitor IoT devices in the warehouse. These complex and repetitive tasks can lead to fatigue and negligence, especially for overworked and understaffed networking teams. At an even higher level, this makes it difficult to see the relationships between different systems and solutions or get a complete picture of the overall health of the enterprise network.
Another limitation of traditional solutions is that they’re often affected by the same issues as the infrastructure they’re monitoring. For example, if the LAN goes down in a remote office and the on-premises security appliance can’t get an IP address, then admins won’t be able to remotely access that appliance to view the monitoring logs. This can significantly delay or even prevent remote diagnostic and recovery efforts, leading to expensive truck rolls.
The problem gets even worse if the remote site is inaccessible due to natural disasters, conflicts, or other external factors. Network teams need a way to get eyes on the problem, diagnose the root cause, and deploy fixes without physically seeing or touching the affected infrastructure.
The ideal remote site monitoring solution
To avoid these limitations and ensure network resilience, the ideal remote site monitoring solution should consider the following factors:
Vendor-neutral and centralized
A vendor-neutral monitoring platform can collect and analyze logs from every component of your infrastructure. This gives admins complete coverage, so nothing falls between the cracks.
Another benefit of vendor neutrality is that it enables unified, centralized monitoring. That means networking teams only need to log in to a single portal to observe the entire distributed enterprise architecture.
Out-of-band
Deploying remote site monitoring on an out-of-band (OOB) network means that it won’t rely on production LAN, WAN, or ISP infrastructure. This ensures that admins always have access to vital monitoring data even during an outage, making it easier to remotely diagnose the issue.
Plus, using an OOB management solution for monitoring improves network resilience even further by giving admins a direct connection to remote infrastructure that doesn’t require an IP address. That means they can still access and fix remote devices during an outage.
Automated
Automated monitoring solutions help to ensure that admins are quickly notified of potential issues and that possible remediation steps are taken even if nobody is available right away. Some solutions can, for example, automatically refresh DHCP on a device that lost its IP address or re-direct traffic to a secondary resource when the primary server stops responding.
Automated monitoring solutions help to reduce the workload on understaffed networking teams without sacrificing resilience.
Building network resilience with ZPE Systems
A centralized, vendor-neutral remote site monitoring solution with out-of-band management and automation support helps to ensure network resilience even when IT staff is reduced or remote sites become inaccessible. The Network Automation Blueprint from ZPE Systems provides a reference architecture for achieving network resilience with OOB, automation, monitoring, and more.
Ready to learn more?
To learn more about remote site monitoring and network resilience, contact ZPE Systems today.