Router monitoring with ManageEngine EventLog Analyzer

Routers, critical devices regulating network traffic, need continuous monitoring to ensure network uptime, detect potential security threats in the early stages, and stay compliant with regulatory mandates. Enable continuous router log monitoring with EventLog Analyzer to:

• Monitor router user activities, suspicious configuration changes, and insider threats.
• Effectively implement capacity planning through traffic trend analysis.
• Detect malicious traffic and spot potential security threats.

What is router monitoring?

Router monitoring is the process of continuously tracking a router's performance, health, and activities to ensure optimal network operation, keep security threats at bay, and achieve compliance. The various aspects of router monitoring include:

• Hardware checks: Check the statuses of the router's CPU utilization, memory usage, disk space, and power supply.
• Router traffic monitoring: Track inbound and outbound traffic to identify potential bottlenecks and security threats.
• Interface monitoring: Track the statuses of the router's interfaces, including link statuses, error rates, and packet loss.

Monitoring these key metrics is essential for network administrators to identify and resolve potential issues proactively, preventing network outages and downtime.

ManageEngine EventLog Analyzer, a comprehensive log monitoring solution, helps you effectively monitor router logs, maintain network reliability, improve performance, and enhance overall network security.

How EventLog Analyzer helps with router monitoring

Router device discovery automation

Automatically discover router devices in your network for log collection and configure them from within the EventLog Analyzer console. Within minutes of deployment, start collecting logs for the effective monitoring of router traffic.

Router logon monitoring

Get visibility into the user logon activities on routers. Gain detailed insights into failed logons, failed logons due to bad authentication, failed SSH logons, and failed VPN logons with automated report generation. Visualize router logons, VPN authentication, and SSH logons based on remote devices, users, and interfaces to spot user authentication anomalies instantly.

Router traffic monitoring

Monitor TCP, UDP, and ICMP traffic with detailed reports providing information on the source IP address, destination, protocol used, and number of packets transmitted. Monitor the overall router traffic and categorize the traffic based on the source and destination for the effective identification of anomalies.

• Router traffic error reports:

  Track traffic anomalies such as too many fragments, invalid fragment lengths, overlapped fragments, denied DHCP snooping, and permitted and denied ARP requests.

• Denied traffic connections:

  Gain visibility into denied traffic and detect anomalies concerning denied connections instantly with trend reports.

• Allowed traffic connections:

  Monitor allowed traffic via routers with detailed reports that give information on the destination and source IP address of the traffic, number of packets, and traffic protocol. Visualize the top allowed traffic based on the source, protocol, and destination IP address. Automate trend reports on allowed traffic connections to detect anomalies. Receive real-time notifications about abnormal router traffic trends and activities.

Router monitoring use cases with EventLog Analyzer

By effectively analyzing router logs, network and security administrators can enhance their network performance, security, and operational efficiency. EventLog Analyzer's router monitoring through log analysis helps with the following:

Security analysis

• Unauthorized access attempts:

  Get notified in real time about abnormal failed logon attempts and unauthorized access to your routers' configurations.

• Security policy violations:

  Monitor for violations of security policies, such as unauthorized protocol usage or configuration changes.

Configuration change tracking

• Configuration error detection:

  Identify configuration errors and misconfigurations that may cause network disruptions and security vulnerabilities with exhaustive configuration reports.

• Unauthorized configuration changes:

  Detect and get alerted to unauthorized configuration changes instantly and take corrective action.

Network troubleshooting

• Problem isolation:

  Correlate router logs with network events to pinpoint the root causes of network issues. EventLog Analyzer allows you to ingest logs from your network monitoring tools as well for effective problem isolation.

• Capacity planning:

  Analyze historical traffic data to forecast future network needs and plan for capacity expansions. Identify peak traffic periods to optimize resource allocation and avoid congestion.

5 reasons to choose EventLog Analyzer as your router monitoring software

1. Predefined alerts for performance bottlenecks and security concerns

Use predefined alert criteria to detect performance bottlenecks and abnormal traffic. Get automated, real-time alerts for unauthorized access, router logons, configuration changes, and more.

2. Automated router logging

Discover the routers in your network automatically using IP or CIDR ranges. Enable logging on the routers from within the EventLog Analyzer console. Centralize the logs of routers and other network devices to get complete network visibility.

3. Traffic monitoring reports

Get predefined traffic monitoring reports providing information on allowed and denied connections. Use ML-based analytics to detect abnormal traffic patterns.

4. Performance bottleneck detection using correlation

Employ EventLog Analyzer's effective log analysis to identify performance bottlenecks by analyzing interface utilization, packet loss, and latency. By correlating these metrics with network events, you can pinpoint the root causes of performance issues and perform corrective actions, such as adjusting QoS settings or increasing bandwidth.

5. Router user activity analysis

Leverage the Incident Workbench to visualize the recent activity of suspicious users, including their last logon time, the configuration modifications they made, and their risk scores. Detect advanced persistent threats and insider threats as soon as possible with the seamless, easy-to-use security analytics module.