Know What Your Network Is Doing — At All Times
Network monitoring provides continuous visibility into the availability, performance, and health of your network infrastructure — routers, switches, firewalls, WAN circuits, and wireless — giving operations teams the situational awareness to detect and respond to problems before they become user-impacting outages.
What RLM Delivers on Network Monitoring
You can't fix what you can't see. Effective network monitoring requires the right coverage, meaningful alert thresholds, and integration with operations workflows — and most enterprise monitoring environments have significant gaps in all three areas.
How We Approach Network Monitoring
Our network advisory runs from discovery and market evaluation through vendor selection and post-deployment optimization — scoped to the Network Monitoring decision in front of you.
Monitoring Coverage Assessment
We audit your current monitoring coverage — what's monitored, what isn't, what alerting exists, and where visibility gaps create blind spots that allow infrastructure issues to go undetected until users complain.
Platform Evaluation
We evaluate network monitoring platforms — SolarWinds, Datadog NPM, PRTG, Kentik, ThousandEyes, and others — against your infrastructure mix, management team size, and integration requirements.
Alert Architecture & Threshold Design
We design the alert framework — meaningful thresholds for each metric type, alert severity levels, suppression logic to reduce noise, and escalation routing — that gives your team actionable alerts rather than alert fatigue.
ITSM & Operations Integration
Monitoring value is realized through integration with operations workflows — automatic incident creation, alert correlation, and the runbook links that guide first responders. We design the ITSM integration architecture.
Network Monitoring Evaluation Criteria
The questions below are the ones that decide whether a Network Monitoring investment pays back — and the ones vendors are least eager to answer.
Coverage Completeness
The most expensive monitoring gaps are the devices and circuits that aren't monitored at all — they fail silently until users report problems. Evaluate coverage completeness before optimizing alert quality.
Metric Selection
Monitoring every available metric creates noise without insight. Evaluate which metrics are actually actionable — interface errors, high CPU, latency threshold violations — vs. metrics that are interesting but don't drive response.
Alert Quality
High false positive rates destroy monitoring credibility. Evaluate the tuning process for alert thresholds and the mechanism for suppressing maintenance windows and known-good conditions.
Time to Detection
How quickly does monitoring detect a failure after it begins? Evaluate polling frequency, synthetic monitoring for sub-minute detection, and the time from failure to first alert.
Historical Data & Trending
Network capacity planning requires historical utilization data. Evaluate metric retention policies and trending capabilities — particularly for circuits and interfaces approaching capacity.
Distributed & Cloud Coverage
Traditional network monitoring tools were designed for on-premises SNMP devices. Evaluate cloud-native monitoring coverage — VPC flow logs, cloud load balancer metrics, SD-WAN telemetry — alongside traditional infrastructure.
"RLM gave us an objective view of our network options that no single vendor could. We replaced aging MPLS across 40 locations and came in 28% under our original budget."
Every engagement is measured against the baseline we establish at the start — not against a vendor’s projection.
Where This Matters Most
Sector-specific considerations we see repeatedly in advanced networking engagements.
A Sample of the Advanced Networking Providers We Evaluate
RLM is vendor neutral. These are among 600+ providers in our evaluation set — inclusion here is not an endorsement, and we are paid by the provider you choose, not by any provider in particular. How that works →
Ready to Move on Network Monitoring?
Start with a no-cost conversation with an RLM network advisor — vendor neutral, no agenda, just clarity on the right path forward for your environment.
Talk to a Network Advisor