Connectivity is now essential in supporting our education system. Remote classrooms, Wi-Fi, and various digital learning solutions are now part of everyday learning. IT teams in education have a big job to do, ensuring that the delivery of educational services remains smooth.
Not only that, but it’s also crucial that education budgets and school staff management are managed to keep up with modern demands. Reliable network monitoring is required to keep education networks secure and usable at all times. Before finding out what the key to successfully managing network monitoring is, let’s take a look at the challenges faced by networks in education.
Challenges in Education Network Monitoring
The networks that schools and universities use are essentially the same as enterprises. This means that education IT teams also have to deal with issues of limited network visibility, poor network documentation, and scalability challenges.
One thing that makes education networks unique is that there are very busy periods on the network, usually from Monday to Friday, from 7am to 4pm. While on weekends and holidays, the network is completely quiet. So what are the challenges that education networks often face? Here are 3 big problems:
1. Very high mobility
One of the biggest challenges in monitoring and managing an education network is its mobility. Both school-owned and student-brought devices, such as cellphones and laptops, will move from home to school or from one classroom to another in the school.
2. Wi-Fi is Highly Needed
School Wi-Fi is a key facility for teachers and students in schools. Without Wi-Fi, modern classroom connectivity would not work. However, from an IT perspective, managing, configuring and troubleshooting Wi-Fi creates an additional set of challenges that are not present in wired internet connections.
3. Must be Supported by Multiple Switches
The very high usage of Wi-Fi in schools means that many distributed network devices must be supported. Occupied networks require WAPs and switches throughout their area to enable the connectivity that students and staff need. This is an additional burden on the IT team as the network has many potential points of failure. Of course, it also increases monitoring costs.
Keys to Successful Education Network Monitoring and Management
School networks need to be accessible when students and teachers need them. Ensuring the network remains available and functioning properly during these critical periods is a combination of effective network planning, design, monitoring and troubleshooting.
Today, there are many best practices for network engineering that apply to education networks, but there are 3 important keys that education IT teams should pay particular attention to. The three keys to success are:
1. Enhanced Network Performance Monitoring and Notifications
Most IT teams already monitor their networks. However, there are some fundamentals of monitoring and notifications that are often not optimized to ensure the network is in good condition to enable a quick response when something goes wrong on the network.
In education IT systems, resolving issues quickly can be the difference between a minor and major disruption. That way, no matter what disruptions exist on the education network, IT teams can address them quickly and more effectively.
Perfecting network performance monitoring starts with ensuring the team is tracking all types of network traffic metrics relevant to the education network. For example, simple up/down monitoring cannot tell when there is bandwidth wastage on the network, but performance monitoring that uses flow protocols and SNMP to capture usage metrics can.
Of course, simply monitoring metrics is not enough. Notifications must be configured to notify the right people at the right time, with the right information. This means striking a balance between network and fast-triggering alerts.
2. Be Proactive in Monitoring the Network
Effective notifications of problems occurring on the network can improve the ability of education IT teams to react to problems and resolve them. However, being reactive is now not enough. With highly variable usage on the network and increasingly complex needs, education IT teams need to focus on proactive network monitoring and management.
Some of these proactive measures include:
- Network Visibility
Incomplete visibility into network capacity and performance issues leads to poor or limited educational service delivery. Network visibility tools that provide automatic device discovery and network mapping can help IT teams proactively detect and resolve small issues before they become emergencies.
- Look out for Signs of Hardware Failure
In many cases, damaged or overloaded network hardware will leave clues before actually disconnecting from the network. Be sure to set up alerts for signs of failure, such as high interface utilization, packet errors, and packet dumps. A current inventory is also invaluable in tracking firmware certification and end-of-life support dates.
- Automation
Identifying network issues generally requires manual intervention. By automating the process, it can increase network uptime and free the IT team from repetitive work. This allows the IT team to focus on other, more important tasks.
Network monitoring tools offer automation for various tasks. IT teams need to figure out what can be automated and what still needs to be done manually.
3. Use Metric History to Improve Capacity Planning
Conducting proper capacity planning can be one of the best ways to improve network optimization efforts in the long run. For schools with limited budgets, it is important to make smart decisions about capacity planning.
Difficulty in assessing and budgeting for end-of-life issues due to outdated hardware, or not being able to properly budget and plan for hardware costs, will lead to poor educational service delivery.
Tracking historical education network metrics and using them to determine when to upgrade hardware, when to modify network topology, and when traffic management can solve problems will help IT teams spend limited funds efficiently.Network monitoring in schools and campuses is needed so that teachers and students can continue to carry out interactive teaching and learning activities. Netmonk as the first network monitoring solution provider from Indonesia that simplifies the complexity of network problems is able to accommodate the network monitoring needed in education. Visit the Netmonk web for more product info.
