Remote Monitoring and Management

If you manage the network at a phone, cable, ISP, railway, power utility, water utility, public safety, military, or government organization, you understand the challenges you face on a daily basis. If your network goes down, you're losing revenue (or incurring fines and penalties) every second. If you don't know where problems are growing, you can't effectively target them with maintenance crews.

If you don't have a good system for remote monitoring and management of your geo-diverse network, you can't keep your costs in check and grow your revenue. You'll constantly be guessing where problems are going to crop up, and that's an expensive game to play.

What you need is an integrated suite of remote monitoring tools that tells you what's happening at your network sites. You'll understand which technician to send, when to send them, and which tools and parts they need to take to perform necessary repairs. Compare this to the unfortunate reality of your customers and users reporting problems to you after they lose service.

So what are the most important elements of the system you need?

Here are the Top 3 Features of Quality Remote Monitoring and Management Gear:

1. The interface must be clear
   If you can't easily understand what your management system is tell you, you have no chance of acting on the data it's collected. You need to a system that offers a clear view of your network. Geographic maps, provided they're zoom-able and are appropriately focused on your network's region, are a popular option. Even novice users can intuitively understand maps at a glance. Web 2.0 and mobile phone interfaces, as long as they're clear and support intelligent alarm filtering, are also useful.
2. You must be able to support all of your gear
   Incompatible equipment causes a lot of frustration. This is especially true when your equipment isn't compatible with your remote monitoring and management system. Even if you can monitor 95% of your equipment, you'll never have the "warm fuzzy" feeling that comes from knowing that 100% of your network has a "green light." Focus on a management system that can work with all of the diverse protocols that are in your network.
3. You must purchase a telco-grade system
   Is your network important? Of course it is. Think about how many people depend on the services you provide. Considering all that, do you think you should be using a consumer-grade PC and operating system to run your enterprise's remote monitoring and management system? Look for proven software running in an ultra-stable environment on a dedicated hardware platform. Ask vendors, "Is your system proven in industrial telecom environments similar to mine? Which ones? Do you have any references I can call who are using your system now?"

You need a remote monitoring and management system that's ultra-stable, that's clear and easy-to-use, and that supports all of your equipment - no matter the manufacturer or protocol.

T/Mon Remote Monitoring and Management Nails the Top 3 Features T/Mon is a hardware & software appliance for remote monitoring that runs on a very stable platform. It's running worldwide right now in networks large and small.

T/Mon monitors more than 25 protocols, spanning the decades from legacy to modern (ex. Encrypted SNMPv3). This makes it an ideal candidate when you have to monitor SNMP gear, but you also have lots of legacy/proprietary/SCADA gear in your network.

Once alarms are brought into T/Mon, it doesn't matter where they originated. All alarms are equal once they've been imported by T/Mon. Any alarm can appear on T/Mon's geographic maps, Web 2.0 interface, or mobile web (smartphone) interface. You can set up automatic text, voice, and/or email alerts for SNMP alarms just as easily as non-SNMP alarms. Everything is in one unified system that can be monitored by a single person (although multiple users are supported for large networks where alarm counts are very high).