There are plenty of options for network monitoring tools today, and that can make it hard to pick the right one for you. Here, we’ll help you sort through your options by taking a look at the 10 best network monitoring tools available today, provide a crash course on network monitoring, and explain what you should look for in a network monitoring tool.

Our current networking environments are accelerating the pace of change. The job of the network manager has become more complicated. There are many more devices to manage. There are more users and more applications to go along with all these devices. This is where network discovery software comes in. While the Network Field Report 2021 shows the average workweek of IT professionals has decreased over the past five years, our knowledge of the network hasn’t improved.

Why SaaS could make your IT skills irrelevant. Headlines like this are scary, right? Well, that article was from back in 2008. Do you feel irrelevant? No, you say? That’s what I thought… There’s no binary transition point when a skill becomes totally irrelevant. IT is always evolving. This shouldn’t be scary. Imagine if you hadn’t evolved your skills since 2000. Or 2010. What are the things you’d be behind on now?

A significant portion of companies have vulnerabilities in their network management practices. These vulnerabilities include a lack of network visibility, configuration backups, proactive network planning, and up-to-date documentation. Despite these vulnerabilities, the majority of IT pros report high confidence in their networks, indicating a potential mismatch between perception and reality.

If this past year has proven anything, it’s that making long-term predictions can be a challenge. After all, who would have predicted a large portion of the workforce would be fully remote and we’d be staying six feet away from each other in grocery stores for most of the year? Even though a curveball like COVID-19 could happen at any time, it doesn’t mean we should completely stop forecasting what things will look like in IT and beyond over the coming months.