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 will have assigned one or more, private or public. It may thus be worth implementing an at least basic form of IP monitoring. With IP monitoring it is meant the monitoring of what IP addresses are assigned in your network, and their changes, but not only. IP monitoring refers to both the actual IP addresses, what is assigned and to what host, and to monitoring using IP addresses, like when the IP is used to filter traffic sources or controlling resource usage. There is not a single definition of the term.
IP monitoring necessarily goes together with a form of IP management, as without it simply knowing that an IP address is assigned to a given host is of little usefulness. IP management refers to how to organize your IP addresses pool, how to manage dynamic and fixed IP assignment, IP allowlisting, and all the sorts of actions that are taken when an IP changes. It is the sum of the consequences that are taken, or not, depending on the assigned IP addresses in a network.
IP monitoring software exists to monitor IP addresses in an organization. Simpler methods, like occasionally pinging devices, are common, without the need of implementing a proper IP monitoring solution, accepting obvious limitations. Regardless of the method used, IP monitoring is a small subset of network monitoring, and one rarely talked about. But it has its uses, as we will see next.
Why monitor IP addresses?
It may not be immediately clear the reason for monitoring IP addresses. There are indeed only a few selected cases where it could be advantageous to.
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 one in the allowlist. That would probably mean a misconfiguration, at a minimum.
To adhere to compliance regulations in some industries IP addresses should be monitored too. Not an active monitoring, as in detecting changes in real time for instance, but at least an updated list of IP addresses in use internally, and to what hosts they are assigned to. This is also good practice to keep a network documentation, where IP addresses are one of the key details.
Monitoring IP addresses can be advantageous to even simply know what range of IPs is in use and if it is close to deplete. For scalability, knowing exactly all the IP addresses in use means the capability of preventing their exhaustion. 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 effort or a complex one, 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 these basic and the more complex IP monitoring tools focus not much on IP address monitoring per se, but rather on what is happening at an IP address, or what an IP is doing in terms of generated traffic. 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 work only on an IP address level, but do 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 then 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 refer also to IP camera monitoring, a type of cameras that have 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.