Monitoring of network connections

Communication is essential in an IT network. Access to your data and internet 24×7 is crucial in the current time. Data connections must be reliable, secure and stable. Tackling communication problems is therefore an important task of the IT manager, which means that monitoring can provide much insight.

OSI model

To understand what the problems can consist of, it is good to know how the communication goes in a network. The exchange of information or data between application programs via a network medium is standardized in the OSI model. Data is sent from layer 7 via layer 1 and received from layer 1 up to layer 7.  

While sending, each layer adds its own information, a process known as encapsulation. With received data, the added information is stripped per layer. The extra information per layer is needed to handle the data traffic. The problems of moving information can also be divided into 7 smaller and manageable categories.

Solution

You can distribute the network problems over these seven layers and systematically solve problems with a network. It is advisable to start solving problems from the physical layer and gradually move to the application layer.
In other words, start with the question “Is the plug in?”