What is IP monitoring?
With many physical, and virtual, devices present on a network, a large pool of IP addresses is necessarily used. Each host has one or more assigned, private or public. It may thus be worth to at least implement a basic form of IP monitoring. With IP monitoring, you not only monitor which IP addresses are assigned in your network and their changes. It refers to both the actual IP addresses, i.e. what is assigned and to which host, as well as monitoring the use of IP addresses, e.g. if the IP is used to filter traffic sources or to control resource usage. There is no standard definition of the term.
IP monitoring is necessarily accompanied by some form of IP management, because without it, the mere knowledge that an IP address is assigned to a particular host is of little use. IP management refers to the organization of your IP address pool, the management of dynamic and fixed IP assignment, IP allowlisting and all kinds of actions that are performed when IP changes occur. It is the sum of the consequences that are taken, or not, depending on the assigned IP addresses in a network.
IP monitoring software exist to monitor IP addresses in an organization. Simpler methods, such as occasionally pinging devices, are common without the need to implement a true IP monitoring solution, accepting obvious limitations. Regardless of the method used, IP monitoring is a small subset of network monitoring, and rarely talked about. But it has its uses, as we will see next.
Why monitor IP addresses?
The reason for monitoring IP addresses may not be immediately clear. There are indeed only a few selected cases where it could be advantageous.
One of them is security. IP address monitoring in this case is not about the IPs you have internally, but those connecting to your infrastructure, especially to internal resources that should not be accessible from the outside. Monitoring them can identify suspicious activities, such as attempts to penetrate network defenses, traffic from known malicious IP addresses, or discovering an IP that is not on the allowlist. That would probably mean a misconfiguration at the very least.
IP addresses should also be monitored to meet the compliance regulations in some industries. This is not active monitoring, such as detecting changes in real time, but at least an updated list of the IP addresses used internally and the hosts to which they are assigned. This is also a good practice for keeping network documentation, in which IP addresses are one of the most important details.
Monitoring IP addresses can be beneficial to simply know which range of IPs is being used and whether it is about to be exhausted. For scalability, precise knowledge of all IP addresses in use means that it is possible to prevent them from being depleted. An IP monitoring software will inform you of the IP capacity you are using and how close you are to the limit.
Overall, IP monitoring can be a critical component for maintaining network security, compliance, and performance. At the very least, it can help organizations keep track of their network’s resources, and plan future changes for optimizing efficiency and effectiveness.
How is IP monitoring performed?
Monitoring IP addresses can be an extremely simple or complex effort, depending on one’s needs. For instance, monitoring a server’s status and uptime can be done through a simple script that sends a connection request to its IP address. Or using ping to check if a specific IP address belongs to a working, and replying, host. These are all simple methods to do IP monitoring, without necessitating a dedicated IP monitoring software.
Both the simple and the more complex IP monitoring tools focus not so much on monitoring IP addresses per se, but rather on what happens at an IP address or what an IP does in relation to the traffic it generates. These tools can provide real-time monitoring of network devices, as well as applications, and offer detailed reports on network performance and usage.
Other tools monitor IP addresses to maintain network security against intrusions. Intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDPS) and firewalls check the IP address and relative traffic to block or allow connections, identify attempted intrusions, and enforce permissions. These tools do not only work on an IP address level, but use IPs to discover problems, and block intruders and malicious traffic.
More related to proper IP monitoring are IP address management (IPAM) software. These are specific tools to manage and track IP address allocation and usage across a network. They are implemented to prevent IP address conflicts, and make sure that there is an efficient utilization of the allotted IP address space.
A family of IP network monitoring tools can also be considered the packet sniffers. While clearly being neither an IP monitoring software nor an IP monitoring management tool, they collect IP addresses as well, and can keep track of the traffic originating from one or more.
Checkmk, while not directly monitoring the IP addresses as an IPAM would do, uses IPs to filter and apply rules for monitoring infrastructure. It can therefore be considered one of many IP monitoring tools available, using IP addresses among tens of other parameters to have a more granular view of your network.
FAQ
What’s the difference between IP monitoring, IP address monitoring, and Ping monitoring?
IP monitoring and IP address monitoring are the same thing when talking about IT networks and infrastructure. IP monitoring may also refer to IP camera monitoring, a type of camera that has an IP address for security monitoring of physical spaces. Ping monitoring is a colloquial term that refers to using the ping tool for basic monitoring of hosts through the use of IP addresses or DNS domains.