A critical requirement for data centers is the ability to proactively monitor the availability of all server and network resources
At a high level, network monitoring is knowing what is happening within your environment
In some ways, it is like the smoke alarm in your house
Whenever there is fire or smoke, the alarm warns you
Network monitoring software is also proactive
It can be tuned to warn you of impending problems that you must be made aware of such as a sudden burst of network traffic and symptoms of Internet attacks on your edge routers