• Within a local area network, network bandwidth is not usually a significant
percentage. However, over low-bandwidth—usually longdistance—
connections, monitoring can choke links, causing performance
to suffer for other applications. Make sure that you know how
much bandwidth your monitoring is using. A rule of thumb is that it
should not exceed 1 percent of the available bandwidth. Try to optimize
your monitoring system so that it is easy on low-bandwidth connections.
Consider putting monitoring stations at the remote locations
with a small amount of communication back to the main site or using
primarily a trap-based system, whereby the devices notify the monitoring
system when there is a failure, rather than a polling-based system,
whereby the monitoring system checks status periodically.