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Network Monitoring Best Practices for IT Support Teams

Alex Thompson - Solutions Engineer20 January 20263 min read

Learn the essential strategies for effective network monitoring, from alert management to capacity planning. Practical advice for IT teams of all sizes.

Effective network monitoring is about more than just knowing when something breaks. It's about maintaining visibility, preventing issues before they occur, and responding quickly when problems do arise. Here are the practices we recommend for IT support teams.

1. Start with Critical Infrastructure

Don't try to monitor everything at once. Begin with your most critical systems:

  • Core network equipment: Routers, switches, firewalls
  • Essential servers: Domain controllers, file servers, email
  • Internet connectivity: External gateways and DNS
  • Line-of-business applications: The systems your users depend on daily
Once you have visibility into these critical components, expand your monitoring footprint gradually.

2. Define Clear Alerting Thresholds

Alert fatigue is real. If your team receives hundreds of alerts daily, important issues will be missed. Set thresholds that matter:

  • Immediate response: Core infrastructure down, security incidents
  • Same-day attention: Degraded performance, capacity warnings
  • Review in standup: Informational, trends to watch
In VelocityPulse, you can configure these thresholds per device or category, ensuring the right issues get the right level of attention.

3. Document Your Network

Monitoring data is most valuable when you understand what you're looking at. Maintain documentation that covers:

  • Network topology and VLAN assignments
  • IP address allocations
  • Device ownership and purpose
  • Change history
Use device descriptions and categories in VelocityPulse to keep this information attached to the devices themselves.

4. Monitor Response Time, Not Just Availability

A device that's "online" but responding in 500ms instead of 5ms is effectively broken for many applications. Track response times and set alerts for degraded performance before users start complaining.

VelocityPulse captures response time for every check, making it easy to spot degradation before it becomes an outage.

5. Plan for Capacity

Use historical data to identify trends:

  • Which segments are approaching capacity?
  • Are certain devices consistently at the edge of acceptable performance?
  • When do you typically see peak utilisation?
Proactive capacity planning prevents the fire drills that come from running out of resources.

6. Test Your Alerting

Regularly verify that alerts actually reach your team. Run through scenarios:

  • What happens if the primary notification channel fails?
  • Do overnight alerts reach the on-call person?
  • Are escalation paths working?
A monitoring system that nobody sees is worse than no monitoring at all.

7. Review and Iterate

Schedule regular reviews of your monitoring setup:

  • Are we monitoring the right things?
  • Have we had incidents we didn't catch?
  • Are alerts being actioned or ignored?
Monitoring is never "done" - it evolves with your infrastructure and team.

Getting Started

If you're not currently monitoring your network, or your existing solution isn't meeting your needs, try VelocityPulse free for 14 days. Our agent-based approach means you can be up and running in minutes, not days.