Two,types,host,monitoring,the, computer Two types of host monitoring on the network
----------------------------------------------------------Permission is granted for the below article to forward,reprint, distribute, use for ezine, newsletter, website,offer as free bonus or part of a product for sale as longas no changes a Gone are those times when the companies and the organisations didn't need a hi-tech system to handle them. Owing to the considerable increase in the business sector and thus, an enormous increase in the complexity of the organisational struc
The hostmonitoring process is to control the amount of devicesconnected to the local network, services efficiency, and to gather theinformation on average and maximal loading level. This information givesadditional opportunities to a system administrator: to react on occurred failuresin time, to optimize the hardwares and network devices operation moreeffectively, and to plan the network upgrades as well. There aretwo types of the host monitoring process: the server and client-server methods. The first one is the server-based periodical scanning of thewhole range of IP addresses on the network, which allows detecting all thedevices connected to it. This kind of scanning usually repeats every 5-10minutes, which helps to gather the current and up-to-the-minute information. Thismethod does not load the network with a lot of insignificant requests. Thesecond type of the host monitoring process is reading the ARP table cache from network switches. This method is much faster than the previousone and does not require the great amount of requests. But its main drawback isthat it cannot help to detect connected hosts, if they do not show anyactivity. Incomparison with the server host monitoring methods, which gather rather limitedamount of data, the client-server methods could constantly read a lot ofdifferent computers parameters, and send them to the server for the furtheranalysis. The main advantage of this kind of host monitoring is that the systemadministrator is able to build a fail-safe system. If there is no response fromthe client during the particular period of time, it is polled again. Inaddition, this method allows generating alerts automatically. In addition tothe data on the device availability on the network, the client-server hostmonitoring method controls all the services that are launched on the remote PC,checks the proper protocols operation, and monitors opened ports. But at thesame time, switches and printers are polled by sending ARP requests or justpinging. This methods disadvantage is additional load on the monitoring PC. TheRAM load can be rather high, which could be noticeable on old computers especiallywhen other monitoring services are launched at the same time. To use theobtained information, the mechanisms of visualization and reports generationare required regardless the chosen host monitoring method. Charts, diagrams,network graphs, and other drawings can be used as the data visualizationmethods. The diagrams on the amount of working hosts are especially convenientand useful. Besides, usually, the most of host monitoring programs allow thesystem administrator to view the information in tables, without the graphical representation.Reports can be generated on demand or automatically for a particular period oftime. By thereference to what has been said, it is necessary to keep in mind a fewimportant factors while choosing a good host monitoring program: 1. Anopportunity to organize a fail-safe system. 2. Thegraphical interface and tools for generating reports must be available. 3. The systemsoperation principle.4.Functionality. Only withthe host operation analysis, it is possible to create the effective host monitoring system with minimalload of client PCs and the network itself.
Two,types,host,monitoring,the,