How to build a network monitoring business case

When making a pitch to buy a new network monitoring tool, network teams should expect questions such as “What’s wrong with how we monitor the network today?” Likely, the network already has some type of monitoring — whether it comprises monitoring network device logs, deployment of open source tools or proprietary monitoring features that are built into networking products.

While these tools and features offer some monitoring and alerting benefits that a fully dedicated network monitoring platform provides, it’s important to point out the shortcomings of current monitoring methods. These shortcomings include facts such as the following:

• They lack true end-to-end visibility.
• Some monitoring capabilities are proprietary and compartmentalized.
• They lack professional support.
• Management of proprietary or decentralized monitoring features is complicated and time-consuming.