Don’t Forget About Wireless Network Monitoring
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by: Sukhdeep
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Word Count: 356
Date: Mon, 9 Aug 2010 Time: 5:37 AM
Do you find that wireless is really that much different than wired networks? For the most part, once you have set up your routers and amplifiers for a building, you really don’t have to make a lot of physical changes to your wireless configuration unless you are making upgrades to the system. With wired connections, you have to deal with ports and cabling all the time – and alongside those issues comes switches and firewalls that are connected to all of that as well. One thing to think about, however, when considering wireless networks outside of just infrastructure is the fact that the traffic which runs through them are basically the same from a network monitoring perspective. Despite whether a user is connecting through wired or wireless connections, it is expected that they will be able to do their work. This is, of course, notwithstanding a users’ potential problem connecting with said wireless, since we all know from time to time that becomes a problem. Getting back to the point here, which is that you still need to monitor wireless and wired networks the same way you would monitor your network. Because you can have the same array of issues you might have with wired networks as you would with wireless you might as well go with an integrated network monitoring solution. Even though your 802.11 is run by access points instead of traditional switches, that doesn’t mean you cannot treat them as important to your system. Being able to properly integrate information from the two types of network connections can be tricky, yet many software packages allow you to integrate these into one, especially those that are network performance management applications. NPMs are generally pretty flexible systems that allow you to configure them as a networking engineer might require them, and wireless networking is no different. There’s really no reason to separate this data. Networking professionals know that they need data, and using an NPM that offers great flexibility to add wireless networking data into a dashboard for things like bandwidth monitoring issues can be helpful down the road.
About the Author
Sukhdeep Singh
www.solarwinds.com
