Vikas Aggarwal, CEO of Zyrion (www.zyrion.com), says:

Given the dispersed nature of today’s organizations, with mobile workers and regional offices, the data center and IT infrastructure in reality extends beyond the boundaries of one or more centralized physical locations. What this means is that the operations team will be required to monitor, from a central NOC location, the performance of core IT infrastructure at remote sites and offices.

The IT infrastructure, devices and applications being monitored will in many situations be behind firewalls, and in most cases, behind NAT-enabled routers. Examples of remote monitoring may include the NOC being responsible for monitoring the execution of daily automated server back-up jobs, amongst other scheduled jobs at the site. The monitoring software will need to generate an alert in the event the back-up job did not execute properly. Additionally, it may be necessary to monitor site-specific applications and servers, such as a local dispatch application, through querying core performance metrics or executing ‘synthetic’ user transactions and monitoring their responses.

In order to address these requirement, there are some key remote site capabilities that need to be available in the network monitoring software (learn more about distributed infrastructure monitoring at http://tiny.cc/rnz53). The ability to gather metrics securely from behind a firewall is critical. What this means is that the monitoring solution has to include easily deployable and low-cost remote data-gathering components that are able to process traps/syslogs/eventlogs and execute scripts locally against monitored devices and applications within the secure remote network. The remote module has to be capable of pushing the data to an upstream event management system via SSL, and not require inbound requests.

Another challenge that the network monitoring software will have to deal with is that of the remote sites and office networks having overlapping or duplicated IP ranges. It’s extremely likely that many of the remote sites are using some parts of the 192.168.x.x network. The monitoring solution has to account for this scenario, and uniquely identify site-specific devices without requiring the re-addressing of the networks just so that they’ll be easier for the IT operations team to monitor and manage.

The ability to monitor and manage secure remote sites is becoming a key requirement for distributed organizations. Make sure your network monitoring software supports remote site monitoring behind firewalls and with over-lapping IP addresses, and includes coverage for a wide range of network infrastructure (see examples at http://tiny.cc/y5rat) to ensure the smooth running of your business operations.