# What is Network Monitoring?

> Network monitoring continuously collects and analyzes information about network infrastructure, connectivity, traffic, and service behavior to understand health, performance, capacity, availability, and security-relevant change.

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- Language: en
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## Content

Evidence may come from device counters, logs, flow records, packet captures, streaming telemetry, management protocols, synthetic probes, wireless sensors, and cloud control planes.

A monitoring design starts with important services and communication paths, then selects observation points, measures, baselines, and alert thresholds. Teams need synchronized time, known asset ownership, tested data pipelines, and response procedures so a graph change can lead to a useful decision.

### Key points

- **Coverage design:** Map critical links, devices, virtual networks, cloud services, dependencies, and alternate paths. Monitor both user-facing service outcomes and the infrastructure that supports them.
- **Signal quality:** Document sampling, polling intervals, retention, expected delay, clock accuracy, sensor health, and collection loss. Test that important events arrive with enough context for diagnosis.
- **Operations and privacy:** Tune alerts against expected behavior, protect monitoring credentials and platforms, and minimize access to packet content and metadata that can reveal communications, location, or user activity. Authorize and rate-limit active tests, especially on operational technology networks.
- **Important limitation:** No monitoring point provides complete truth. Encryption, asymmetric routing, short-lived resources, unsupported protocols, sampling, overload, and collection failure create blind spots; normal-looking measurements do not prove that a network or application is secure.

### Related terms

[Network traffic](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/network-traffic/>) · [Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP)](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/simple-network-management-protocol/>) · [Security telemetry](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/security-telemetry/>) · [Network detection and response (NDR)](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/network-detection-and-response/>) · [Packet loss](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/packet-loss/>)

### Sources

[NIST SP 800-137: Information Security Continuous Monitoring](https://csrc.nist.gov/pubs/sp/800/137/final) · [NIST SP 800-215: Guide to a Secure Enterprise Network Landscape](https://csrc.nist.gov/pubs/sp/800/215/final) · [RFC 7011: IP Flow Information Export](https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7011.html)

## Attribution and scope

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