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Network monitor

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While an intrusion detection system monitors a network for threats from the outside, a network monitoring system monitors the network for problems caused by overloaded and/or crashed servers, network connections or other devices.

For example, to determine the status of a webserver, monitoring software may periodically send an HTTP request to fetch a page. For email servers, a test message might be sent through SMTP and retrieved by IMAP or POP3.

Commonly measured metrics are response time, availability and uptime, although both consistency and reliability metrics are starting to gain popularity. The widespread addition of WAN optimization devices is having an adverse effect on most network monitoring tools -- especially when it comes to measuring accurate end-to-end response time because they limit round trip visibility.^[1]

Status request failures - such as when a connection cannot be established, it times-out, or the document or message cannot be retrieved - usually produce an action from the monitoring system. These actions vary -- an alarm may be sent (via SMS, email, etc.) to the resident sysadmin, automatic failover systems may be activated to remove the troubled server from duty until it can be repaired, etc.

Monitoring the performance of a network uplink is also known as network traffic measurement, and more software is listed there.