Network Monitoring Basics
Build practical skills in router configuration, IP addressing, and network troubleshooting that you can apply immediately in real environments.
What You'll Learn
Section 1: Monitoring Protocols
- SNMP versions and community strings
- MIB structure and OID navigation
- Syslog severity levels and facilities
- NetFlow and sFlow data collection
Section 2: Tool Deployment
- Open source platforms
- Zabbix installation and initial configuration
- LibreNMS device auto-discovery
- Data visualization
- Grafana dashboard creation
- Time-series database basics
Section 3: Metrics and Baselines
- Interface statistics and error counters
- CPU and memory utilization tracking
- Establishing normal behavior patterns
- Capacity planning with historical data
Section 4: Alerts and Response
- Threshold configuration and tuning
- Notification methods and escalation
- Alert fatigue prevention strategies
- Incident documentation practices
Effective monitoring prevents small problems from becoming major outages. This course teaches SNMP configuration, syslog management, and alerting systems for network infrastructure.
You will deploy monitoring tools like Zabbix and LibreNMS, configure bandwidth tracking, and set up automated alerts. Labs include creating custom dashboards, analyzing traffic patterns, and establishing baseline metrics.
Practical monitoring skills
The program covers both agent-based and agentless monitoring approaches. Participants learn to monitor switch port status, router CPU usage, and link utilization without overwhelming devices with polling requests.
Sessions include log analysis techniques, identifying patterns that indicate hardware failures, and configuring threshold-based alerts. You will practice responding to simulated network events using monitoring data to diagnose root causes.
Why monitoring matters for network reliability
Monitoring systems detect degraded performance before users notice problems, allowing proactive maintenance and capacity planning.
Instructor Dmytro Shevchuk manages monitoring infrastructure for a regional ISP with 340 network devices. Maximum 16 participants per session to allow hands-on practice with monitoring platforms.