Critical networked assets can often be hidden in dark spots due to a lack of network and IoT asset observability. This is particularly true for multi-site retail businesses or campus-style environments with numerous buildings.
Organizations try to address this issue of IoT asset observability by using expensive IoT or edge monitoring solutions, but it can be challenging to monitor devices that use different protocols with a single solution.
Many IoT devices are business-critical, such as POS systems, sensors for food refrigeration, temperature or humidity, or CCTV cameras, and have APIs available from their cloud systems which require proprietary integration strategies.
Network admins can add a significant amount of visibility and observability of these hidden assets through the lens of the network switch by using a network performance monitoring tool (NPM), such as Statseeker.
Each of these critical, yet hard-to-see, network devices are connected to a switch port directly, or else the access point via wireless is on a switch port. Start by using the Ping capability, which monitors whether the devices are up/down on the network and returns the delay and jitter in the network to show the quality required for latency-sensitive services.
Take an IP CCTV camera, for example. When the interface it is connected to is monitored, a network engineer can determine whether the camera is streaming based on the Rx bps. Over 4Mbps would be a standard definition image stream. A threshold alert can be configured to inform the NetOps or surveillance team if the camera goes offline or fails.
Another example of where Statseeker could be used to improve asset visibility is in small local networks using IoT devices. These could be a chain of coffee shops, retail stores or a group of gas stations, for example. During closed hours, these networks would generate a very small baseline amount of data transfer. Network monitoring could be used to identify malicious activity or network intrusion if there is a sudden change in the baseline data.
Anomalies could indicate an IoT device, such as a CCTV or a POS system (especially if it’s cloud-based), is not behaving the way it should. With Statseeker anomaly detection, the network switch ports can be monitored during various shifts or off hours for anonymous behaviors in switch port traffic. Alerts and dashboards can be configured to highlight unusual traffic patterns of business-critical devices that warrant investigation.
Latitude and longitude can also be added to networked devices to enable instant visualization and physical location of issues. The Statseeker image map dashboard can be configured to display buildings or remote sites in a map or network layout, in a similar way that Cacti graphs your network topology.
Statseeker polls every sixty seconds and stores a full history of as-polled data, and so a complete history is always available to network admins for IoT device behaviors for alerting, analytics, and reporting.
Next steps
Click here to try Statseeker free for 45 days (no credit card required). Set up is straightforward and takes less than an hour.