Network scanning is an integral part of network monitoring and management processes. It helps network admins stay ahead of issues such as security breaches and resource exhaustion. Giving a clear overview of the network components, network scanners help carry out several day-to-day network tasks with ease, such as security reconnaissance and maintenance. However, network scanners are not just beneficial to the defenders of the network, but to the attackers as well. Malicious intruders can also use network scanners to identify weak spots in your network, making it vulnerable. This conundrum makes it important that you deploy not just any network scanner, but a reliable solution that offers full coverage, comprehensive insights, and is customizable as per your network needs.
With a myriad of solutions available in the market, enterprise grade solutions such as ManageEngine OpUtils’ network scanner is a top candidate. These network scanners are built with complex IT infrastructures in mind, enabling you to:
Run comprehensive organization-level scans with ease.
Customize and trigger scans to suit your network requirements.
View in-depth details of the scanned components.
Automate scan schedules and eliminate repetitive manual tasks.
Be notified of issues instantly with alerts and receive granular reports.
1. Run real-time comprehensive organization-level scans with ease.
Organizational networks often span multiple subnets, supernets, DHCP servers, switch ports, routers, and thousands of IPs. This massive scale makes it impractical to use native tools or commands to scan and track the network status. Also, using these solutions is time-consuming and do not offer real-time insights. This opens your network to security risks due to weak spots that were not detected and fortified.
To understand your network devices better and reduce your network’s risk vector, it is important to deploy an effective network scanner solution. A network scanner can scan and display comprehensive insights in real time. These real-time insights help you tackle potential security threats at the right time effectively. Since most network scanners support both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses and offer cross subnet scanning, the device simplifies the process of scanning complex IT infrastructures. Also, these network scanning solutions can scan hundreds of network components in a short time without requiring much manual effort.
2. Customize and trigger scans that suit your network requirements.
Each organization’s networks are built to suit its unique networking needs. Due to the limitations of rigid conventional tools, network admins might depend on more than one tool to scan their network resources. While this can sometimes lead to overlapped scanning by different tools, it can also lead to blind spots in your network where none of the tools scan. This is why you need to deploy a complete network scanner that can suit your network specific needs, offers a centralized view, and eliminates the need for other scanning tools.
This is where enterprise network scanning solutions such as OpUtils step in. They offer different scan types that can be triggered from a single console to skip the hassle of conflicting scans caused by using different tools. They also support different scanning techniques such as ICMP, TCP, and SNMP, that enable full-network coverage.
The most popular scan types offered by network scanning solutions include:
IP Scanning: Scans your network end-to-end based on your IP address space.
Port Scanning: Enables better security by displaying the list of open ports and the services running in them.
Vulnerability scanning: Helps you secure your network from unauthorized access by displaying the list of rogue devices in your network.
3. View in-depth details of the scanned components.
What good is network scanning if it does not give you actionable insights? One of the key motivators to regularly scanning networks is to inspect different aspects of the networking components. Apart from reinforcing network security, this also helps better maintain network components. Network scanners, besides determining the active hosts, help you in this task by displaying in-depth details of the scanned components. With this, you can inspect new devices, verify IP allocations, track connected devices and their locations, and block ports running suspicious services. By providing a comprehensive snapshot of your network devices, network scanners simplify the network management and troubleshooting processes.
4. Skip repetitive manual tasks by automating scan schedules.
To reap the full benefits of network scanning, it needs to be performed continually on regular intervals based on the network requirements. But expecting your IT team to continually watch and manually trigger scans on your network resources every time it needs to be scanned is impractical. A network scanner with scan automation capabilities helps you skip this monotonous task. All you have to do is set up different scan schedules for different resources by specifying the resources details, type of scan, and scan intervals. Once set up, the network scanner automatically triggers the scans and displays the updated details.
5. Stay ahead of issues with instantaneous alerting and granular reports.
The primary goal of monitoring and managing networks is to ensure a mishap-free seamless networking experience for our end users. Network scanners play an important role in attaining this goal. They help you keep a constant watch on crucial network resources, identify issues in real time, and pinpoint the cause of these issues.
Advanced network scanners like OpUtils also offer threshold based alerts that help you set baselines for optimal resource usage and alert you in case there is a violation. Network scanners help you track your scan results and their variations over time by periodically generating reports. With these granular reports you can enhance your capacity planning and better predict your network requirements.
Looking for a network scanner that offers all these capabilities? Try ManageEngine OpUtils today. This comprehensive IP address management and switch port mapper software enables effective network resource monitoring. With more than 30 built-in network tools and effective rogue detection capabilities, OpUtils helps you seamlessly scan, monitor, and secure your network. Download a free, 30-day trial or schedule a free demo with our product exports to explore hands-on how it suits your network!
