Router monitoring involves managing the router network as a whole where the performance, health, security and availability of the router is continuously monitored to ensure better operation and minimal downtime. Routers are basic connecting components of the network and hence it is crucial to monitor routers from time to time. Let's read why router monitoring is essential to enterprises, challenges encountered, features of a good router monitoring tool and much more.
Why is router monitoring important to organizations?
WAN links and the routers that serve them are usually the most expensive part of the network, and managing bandwidth allocation can be complex. Over-subscribing to bandwidth could mean that the company is paying for more bandwidth than required and under-subscribing could result in congestion and unacceptable network performance.
WAN monitoring and router monitoring thus become critical to not just day-to-day productivity but also to a company's bottom-line. Network managers will need to optimize the quality of service by balancing throughput, committed information rate (CIR) and burst rate with congestion, response time, and discards.
Challenges of managing WAN links through router monitoring
Some of the WAN monitoring challenges include optimizing bandwidth allocations, ensuring high network availability, quickly resolving WAN problems, capacity planning for future requirements, minimizing recurring costs on WAN links, identifying high traffic/ utilization sources and spotting & updating problematic legacy routers. Hence, choosing a right network monitoring tool will help you overcome all these challenges like a pro.
Here is what OpManager does in monitoring the router and WAN.
Router and WAN Monitoring with OpManager
OpManager is a highly integrated network monitoring software that has inherent capability to monitor routers and WAN links efficiently. Monitor any network device like routers, switches, firewalls, servers, VMs, printers, load balancers, wireless LAN controllers, storage devices and any other device that is able to connect to the network through an IP.
Measure Bandwidth and Traffic to Optimize Bandwidth Allocation
OpManager monitors your WAN links' bandwidth, utilization, errors, discards and thus helps you verify service level agreements (SLAs) with your Internet Service Providers (ISPs). By presenting accurate information on traffic and utilization for every link in your WAN, you can identify highly utilized and under-utilized links allowing you to optimize bandwidth allocation across links.
Monitoring WAN Links Proactively & Ensure High Network Availability
By proactively monitoring link latency & link errors and assigning threshold alerts to these, you can identify degradations early and avoid costly downtime. And what's worse than your links going down? Not knowing that they are! OpManager alerts you whenever a link goes down. Alerts can be sent as emails or text messages which contain details on thresholds breached and relevant link details eg. the "circuit ID" which allow the administrator to pinpoint unavailable links quickly.
OpManager's reporting functionality also provides you with a detailed availability report of all your interfaces. You can use these reports to cross-check whether your SLAs are being met.
Visualize your WAN Links & Resolve WAN Problems Quickly
With OpManager you can create business views (maps) to graphically visualize your entire WAN. You now gain complete visibility on your WAN links and track outages to the hop level. Apart from your infrastructure, WAN performance depends very much on the ISPs you subscribe to for the WAN service. OpManager provides insights on your WAN link performance by displaying hop-wise latency count from which you can identify whether the problem resides in your infrastructure or with the ISP's.
Identify Current Traffic Trends, Minimize Current Recurring Costs and Plan Capacity for the Future
OpManager helps network managers save on monthly recurring costs by identifying under-utilized links. Armed with historical traffic trend charts and link utilization reports, network managers can also plan for additional capacity well in advance. If you are seeing abnormally high traffic / utilization, you can now find out why. Get detailed traffic analysis in OpManager by integrating it with ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer. Know which users or applications are using your bandwidth and see who the top talkers are.
Monitor Router Performance, Spot Problematic/Legacy Routers and Initiate Updates/Upgrades and Replacements
OpManager helps track various parameters via the following router monitors
Also using OpManager's custom SNMP monitors, you can monitor several other critical performance metrics provided by your router vendor.
OpManager helps you to quickly identify unusual behavior/performance in your routers and logs these as events. You can now list down troublesome routers which need upgrade/update/replacement.
The groups feature helps simplify network management by allowing network administrators to categorize devices and interfaces where pushing bulk configurations to a large number of devices simultaneously.
Alarms and alert notifications
OpManager empowers you to set up alerts that activate upon detecting faults. This gives you the freedom to automate corrections or alert administrators. The notification profile allows you to customize communication channels, receiving alerts through Email, Slack, webhooks, and more, or creating tickets in ticketing applications such as SDP, Jira etc.
To monitor router performance effectively, focus on metrics such as:
CPU and memory utilization: High usage can signal hardware bottlenecks.
Interface throughput: Analyze data rates to ensure the router is handling traffic as expected.
Errors and discards: Monitor for CRC errors, packet drops, and input/output discards.
Buffer utilization: High buffer misses could indicate traffic congestion.
Advanced tools like OpManager provide features such as real-time SNMP-based monitoring, detailed performance graphs, and customizable alerts to diagnose issues like overloaded processors or misconfigured interfaces.
How to optimize WAN bandwidth?
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WAN bandwidth optimization requires:
Traffic pattern analysis: Use tools to identify high-bandwidth applications and users.
QoS policies: Implement Quality of Service to prioritize critical traffic.
Threshold-based alerts: Set thresholds for bandwidth usage to prevent over-subscription.
Router upgrades: Ensure devices support higher bandwidth and modern routing protocols like MPLS or SD-WAN.
Integrating tools like NetFlow Analyzer with OpManager allows deep traffic insights, helping balance network loads and prevent bandwidth underutilization or saturation.
What are the key aspects of router monitoring?
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Key aspects of effective router monitoring and management include:
Traffic monitoring: Analyze interface-level traffic patterns to detect congestion.
Error and discard analysis: Monitor for errors like packet fragmentation or checksum mismatches.
Resource utilization: Track CPU, memory, and hardware health indicators like temperature and voltage.
Protocol health checks: Monitor routing protocols (OSPF, BGP) for stability and configuration anomalies.
What are the critical router monitoring metrics?
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Critical metrics include:
CPU and memory utilization: Prevent performance degradation by tracking high resource use.
Network throughput: Ensure traffic is handled efficiently across interfaces.
Latency and jitter: Low latency is essential for real-time applications like VoIP.
CRC errors and collisions: High rates indicate faulty cables, interference, or hardware issues.
Power supply and temperature: Overheating can cause unexpected device failures.
Tips for effective router monitoring in 2025
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To keep up with emerging technologies and evolving network demands:
Automate monitoring: Use tools with automated discovery and anomaly detection features.
Leverage AI: Employ machine learning to predict device failures or performance issues.
Integrate SD-WAN monitoring: Track application-level performance on software-defined WANs.
Adopt zero-trust principles: Incorporate continuous monitoring for security vulnerabilities.
Historical data analysis: Use traffic trends for capacity planning and reducing operational costs.
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Hinduja Global Solutions (HGS) is an Indian business process management (BPM) organization headquartered in Bangalore and part of the Hinduja Group. HGS combines technology-powered automation, analytics, and digital services focusing on back office proces