Throughout my career as an IT professional, I have set up, knocked down, broke, fixed, spilled blood, and cried over network monitoring systems. From an IT infrastructure standpoint, justification for an NMS is easy. You want to know what, when and where something happens in your environment, so that you can determine the "WHY" and "HOW."

This article focuses more on the basics of an NMS and not necessarily a sales pitch for a specific product. With that being said, let's start with breaking down what I'll be talking about: