Network Monitoring

The StoneGate Monitoring Overviews dashboard provides a central visual monitoring place for the network data. The overviews are collections of statistical charts and tables, which can be arranged in a grid to conveniently to monitor several statistical charts at once. The administrator can save several Overviews to have quick access to, for example, most important or most used views.

Some issues that would require an administrator's attention can develop gradually. For instance, the firewall may start to drop packets at a rate that is slowly increasing. As it is difficult to notice this by just looking at the numbers, the trend is easy to see when the same information is presented graphically.

To be truly useful, the presentation needs to be customizable to meet the specific requirements of each customer’s environment and the needed information has to be available and visible immediately.

With Monitoring Overviews, the administrator can follow the general trends in network traffic and bandwidth utilization from several sources in real time. The administrator can, for example, see the utilization of an interface or VPN tunnel, allowed and denied connections, and general volume of traffic as pie charts, bar charts, or curve charts, depending on the type of statistics viewed.

Geolocations

StoneGate Management Center can resolve the geographical locations of IP addresses. The administrators can utilize geolocations to identify anomalous trends in the network. For example, the administrator can monitor where the current attacks are coming from.

Geolocations are resolved automatically from the GeoIP database that comes with StoneGate Management Center. The database is updated along the StoneGate Management Center upgrades. Note that the administrator can also specify geolocations for private networks and address ranges. Geolocations can be viewed directly in the Log Details view and used in the Top Rate statistics maps.