What does UDP monitoring mean?

Monitoring is a convenient practice to keep your online business infrastructure under control. The more details you can check on every component, the healthier your system will be. In addition, constant checks are excellent data sources to detect and fix issues fast, change strategies, and improve.

UDP monitoring or User Datagram Protocol monitoring means a helpful tool used to check the status of communication and reachability of hosts through a UDP connection. It is a simple monitoring method but an efficient one. Through UDP monitoring, you can get important insights and visibility about the hosts’ operation and problems that have to be fixed. It can alert you when it detects problems.

Shortly explained, UDP monitoring checks the connectivity of a User Datagram Protocol port number on a specific IP address. In case the connection does not work, the check will be marked as “down”.

What is UDP for?

Knowing UDP functions can help to draw easier the uses and possibilities of User Datagram Protocol monitoring.

UDP is a standard communication protocol helpful for transferring data between network hosts. UDP simplifies this task by directly sending datagrams to a destination (receiver) without waiting for a two-way connection. The mandatory handshake between sender and receiver to start the data transfer used by other protocols is not required by UDP. It emphasizes speed over reliability.

Besides, it does not point out the order in which datagrams are transmitted nor confirm the datagrams’ arrival. Instead, UDP ensures data integrity only through checksums and uses port numbers to establish the role of the transmitted data.

You can easily realize that UDP is not a good way to transfer sensitive information. Such data could arrive to the receiver glitchy, with blank spaces, or out of order. But UDP is a great choice for tasks in which fast speed is more critical than data integrity. UDP reduces latency a lot!

Why use UDP monitoring?

You have to ensure the connectivity, and administrators know it is not simple to manually test UDP connections. UDP monitoring makes it easier through a UDP Ping -sending a datagram to a host to check it. This action will detect slow response or downtime. The sooner you realize issues, the faster you can fix them not to affect your clients’ service.
You should use UDP monitoring to check for DNS service presence and DHCP service availability and test the SNMP host to detect connectivity issues and protocols (DNS, RIP, SNMP, DHCP, and more) response.
Test the availability of hosts and time-sensitive applications. Those that can’t afford delays or the retransmission of dropped packets. Think about video streaming, online gaming, video traffic, DNS lookups, or Voice over IP.
With UDP monitoring, you can trace the route between connections to know where the problem comes from.

Conclusion

Now you know UDP monitoring means a way for you to be aware of issues and chances to improve and fix them fast. So let it give you a hand with monitoring. You won’t regret it!