Network Monitoring: Catch Saturated Links and Dropped Connections Before Your Users Do
Network problems are the quietest kind of outage, a saturated link slows everything down, a server drops off the network entirely, and nothing on the machine itself looks wrong. Network Monitoring watches traffic and connectivity on your servers across AWS, Azure, GCP, and DigitalOcean, alerts you the moment bandwidth crosses a threshold or a server stops responding, and delivers scheduled PDF reports per project.
What Is Network Monitoring?
Network Monitoring collects network-level metrics, traffic in and out, and connectivity, from servers across AWS, Azure, GCP, and DigitalOcean, and shows them in the same dashboard as the rest of your server metrics. You set thresholds on the metrics that matter, bandwidth levels, or a server becoming unreachable, and when one is crossed, an alert goes out. Monitoring plugins are configured per project, and scheduled PDF reports summarize every configured plugin per project, delivered without anyone logging in.
Why Network Problems Are the Hardest to See
Everything looks slow, nothing looks broken
A saturated network link makes every service sluggish while CPU and memory look perfectly healthy, so the usual checks find nothing.
Silent disconnects
A server that drops off the network doesn't report anything, by definition. Without an outside check, its absence goes unnoticed.
Traffic grows quietly
Bandwidth usage climbs gradually as usage grows, invisible until a link saturates at the worst possible moment.
Four clouds, four views
Network metrics live in a different console per provider, so nobody watches them consistently across AWS, Azure, GCP, and DigitalOcean.
What Network Monitoring Typically Covers
Traffic Metrics
Bandwidth in and out on connected servers, collected continuously through monitoring plugins, across all four supported clouds.
Connectivity & Reachability
Checks that flag when a server stops responding, so a silent disconnect is caught by the monitoring, not by a user.
Threshold Alerting
Set a threshold on any network metric, a bandwidth level, or reachability itself, and an alert goes out the moment it's crossed.
Scheduled PDF Reports
Network metrics appear alongside every other configured plugin in the per-project PDF reports, generated on schedule and delivered by email.
Benefits of Network Monitoring
Saturation caught early
Bandwidth thresholds flag a link filling up before it slows every service behind it.
Disconnects don't go silent
A server dropping off the network triggers an alert instead of waiting for someone to notice it's gone.
One view, four clouds
Network metrics for AWS, Azure, GCP, and DigitalOcean servers in the same dashboard as CPU, memory, and disk.
Reports without logins
Network health lands in the same scheduled per-project PDF reports as everything else.
How We Set Up Network Monitoring
Connect servers
Connect servers across AWS, Azure, GCP, and DigitalOcean.
Enable network plugins per project
Turn on traffic and connectivity monitoring for the projects that need it.
Set thresholds
Define the bandwidth levels and reachability conditions that should trigger an alert.
Schedule reports
Network metrics roll into each project's scheduled PDF report automatically.
Teams whose incidents keep starting with "the site feels slow" and ending with a network cause, and anyone running servers across more than one cloud, get the most value from Network Monitoring.
Before and After
Traffic on a production server creeps up for weeks. One busy afternoon the link saturates, every page slows to a crawl, and the team burns an hour ruling out CPU, memory, and the database before anyone thinks to look at the network.
Outbound traffic crosses its threshold and an alert goes out immediately, naming the server and the metric — the team knows it's a network problem before the first user notices anything.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
- Monitoring CPU, memory, and disk closely while leaving network metrics unwatched, the slowest incidents to diagnose usually start there.
- Setting bandwidth thresholds once and never revisiting them as traffic grows.
- Only checking connectivity from inside the server, a machine that's off the network can't report its own absence.
Network Monitoring Best Practices
- Set bandwidth thresholds below the point where users would feel it, so alerts arrive with room to act.
- Enable reachability checks on every production server, not just the public-facing ones.
- Review traffic trends in the scheduled PDF reports to catch gradual growth before it becomes saturation.
Where It Fits Into Your Existing Stack
Network Monitoring is part of the same Monitoring platform as your CPU, memory, and disk metrics, and its data is what ChatOps queries when you ask why things are slow.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Get Started
If your slowest incidents to diagnose keep turning out to be network problems, Network Monitoring puts those metrics on the same dashboard and alert system as everything else. Get in touch to see it running against your servers.