Network management is a necessity. With today’s modern infrastructure, there isn’t a whole lot you can do effectively without it. It’s like tech’s version of the old American Express slogan, “Don’t leave home without it.” You have to deal with the ever-changing needs of the business, constant cybersecurity threats, and complex private and public networks.

The word observability has its root in control theory. R.E. Kálmán in 1960 defined it as a measure of how well you can infer the internal states of a system from knowledge of its external outputs. Observability is such a powerful concept because it allows you to understand the internal state of a system without the complexity of the inner workings. In other words, you can figure out what’s going on just by looking at the output.

Undeniably, monitoring your servers is extremely important. Not only does it help you stop issues daily, but it also helps you with tasks like scaling and capacity planning. But no matter how advanced your monitoring is, it always starts with a simple server health indication. Actually, maybe “simple” isn’t the best word here. “Server health” usually gives you a “healthy/not healthy” indication.

The times when it was enough to install an antivirus to protect yourself from hackers are long gone. We actually don’t hear much about viruses anymore. However, nowadays, there are many different, more internet-based threats. And unfortunately, you don’t need to be a million-dollar company to become a target of an attack. Hackers these days use automated scanners that search for vulnerable machines all over the internet. One such modern threat is a traffic analysis attack.

Past performance isn’t always a good predictor of “now” performance, so for this reason, real-time monitoring is a critical part of network management. Organizations must know what’s happening on their network at any given moment. So let’s look at how real-time monitoring can help you accomplish this task.