Establishing the normal and detecting deviations
There are two scenarios where a network engineer needs to exercise his troubleshooting skills. One, when there is network degradation or an incident detected through proactive monitoring of the network as defined in the previous chapter, and two, when a user reports an issue leading to reactive troubleshooting.
It is important for the network engineer to know what normal behavior on the network is. This normal or expected behavior is referred to as the baseline and any unexplained significant deviations from this baseline would be considered abnormal behavior and should be investigated.
The network baseline
We discussed the importance of monitoring the network in the previous chapter. Monitoring the network for parameters and trending those parameters over time will what is normal for the network. The important parameters that need to be monitored, among others, are as follows:
- Link states of LAN and WAN ports
- User port status for the active ports...