Complex networks make it hard to detect issues before service degrades; isolate root causes before veering down the wrong path; or manage a flood of alerts – while not missing the most important ones. These layers of complexity can easily increase mean time to recovery (MTTR) which is the average time that a device will take to recover from any failure, and it’s expensive.

In fact, last year the Aberdeen Group issued a report* that calculated the cost of downtime to average $181,770 an hour.

To fix this problem you may turn to a Big IT Vendor to seek an application performance management (APM) product that promises to resolve issues more quickly in order to avoid downtime and performance issues. In reality the “solution” can become almost as big as the problem – as evaluations take too long, costs run high, features get overloaded, and integration becomes too complex.

Before you get yourself into this situation you might want to consider three success factors that can help you find the best APM product to reduce MTTR:

1. Control
The biggest obstacle to reducing MTTR is finding and isolating the root cause before any compromising event occurs. In order to do this you should be able to define complete dependencies for each application in order to find the quickest path to the root cause.

2. Visibility
One unified dashboard view of conditions across the entire application ecosystem can give you the required visibility into threats against overall health, and the ability to drill straight down to root cause. In order to avoid taking too many steps (and missteps) you should be able to use a single monitor.

3. Agility
Being able to easily find a root cause is a big deal. Once you find it, you have to be able to fix it immediately. In this case, the fastest route to resolution means you should be able to easily set up automated policies and actions.

Be optimistic. You can reduce MTTR by comprehensively monitoring of all of your critical applications, and their dependencies to better detect problems, isolate root causes and restore services.

You just don’t have to break the bank and wait too long for it to happen.

*”Datacenter Downtime: How Much Does It Really Cost?” by D. Csaplar, Aberdeen Group, March 2012

Several months ago, Ipswitch engaged Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) to research and provide an independent opinion on network management software licensing options, which base price on either devices or active elements being monitored. One outcome of this research is a white paper EMA authored, “What You Should Know about Licensing for Network Monitoring Solutions.”

I recently met with Daniel Okine, Senior Technical Product Manager here at Ipswitch and our resident guru on pricing strategies to ask him why we engaged EMA to research this subject. “IT professionals know that licensing options can be confusing and that clear information on the true costs of ownership is valuable,” commented Daniel. “We also wanted an independent point of view to challenge our pricing approach and be sure it is the best option for our customers.”

The EMA research paper explains the three most popular pricing strategies for network management systems, each of which is based on the number of:

(1)    Devices or

(2)    Active interfaces/ports or

(3)    Active measurements/test.

EMA discusses the pros and cons of each approach, and the reader can complete a questionnaire to help him/her determine the best pricing strategy based on their organization’s requirements.

“Ipswitch follows the device-based licensing approach,” Daniel explained. “With device-based licensing, IT can more easily calculate the total cost of ownership (TCO). We have learned that this type of licensing also delivers the best TCO.” EMA agrees that device-based licensing is the best alternative if your network changes frequently or if you are uncertain how many interfaces or ports you will need to monitor on-going.

One of the biggest problems with element-based pricing is that it’s hard to calculate accurate license count requirements. Some vendors, for example, will undersell the license count and then exercise their audit rights at the end of the year. If they find that the customer is using more licenses than what they paid for – which often happens – they will charge the customer with “True up” costs. Nothing disturbs the CFO more than True up costs.

The white paper is a quick read, and for those of you have yet to buy network monitoring software or are reviewing your current costs, you may want to keep this research and the short questionnaire handy.

For those of you who have purchased a system, please share your experience on what pricing strategy works best for you and why.

If you think that public sector organizations can’t be leaders when it comes to IT management, think again.

At Ipswitch’s Network Management Division, we work with government IT teams at the federal, state and local levels every day, and get to see just how innovative they really are. It’s one of the public sector’s best-kept secrets.

Thankfully, government IT departments are finally getting the recognition they deserve. Matt Asay, blogger at ReadWrite (they dropped the Web last year) wrote a great piece last month, listing several examples of innovation in government IT. The Wall Street Journal has also profiled the steps Chicago is taking to filter previously fragment information into new analytics software that policymakers can use in the city’s infrastructure planning process:

The system will allow policymakers to analyze disparate pieces of information from across agencies, including crime statistics, building and business permits, and transcripts from resident complaints, Chicago’s chief data officer, Brett Goldstein, told CIO Journal. Goldstein hopes the system, which will be available to all agencies, will help officials parse out patterns for violent crime and allow public workers to provide better services by understanding how different factors affect city life.

Chicago’s team is also doing this with little funding, as the city works to close a $300 million budget deficit. Talk about doing more with less…

If you’re working in public sector organizations, we’d love to hear about the new projects your team is working on – and whether or not you’re getting the credit you deserve.

For IT folks in the private sector, we hope this starts to change your perspective on your government counterparts.

The Early Days of BYOD

Happy 40th Anniversary Mobile Phone!!

How many of you are old enough to remember the first mobile phone, introduced 40 years ago today? If you aren’t, here is a picture of the first commercial handheld cellular phone that Motorola introduced in 1983, The DynaTAC 8000X. A beauty – and only the coolest of us owned one. It weighed 29oz, or almost 800g  and offered 30 minutes’ talk time and 8 hours’ standby. It also had an LED display for dialing and a 30-number recall. Yours for just $3,995 – equivalent to $9,300 in 2013.

We have come a long way! Today, employees use multiple wireless devices - alternating between smartphones, notebooks and tablets. As wireless becomes an organization’s primary user network, IT needs to deliver the availability and same performance their users expect from a wired network. BYOD complicates this by increasing network density, bandwidth consumption and security risks.

WhatsUp Gold includes the first-ever vendor neutral wireless monitoring solution - a single solution to let IT demonstrate compliance, investigate problems, and validate wireless network design. So it’s important for the Ipswitch team to say: Happy 40th Anniversary Mobile Phone and thanks for the memories!

The answer to BYOD security concerns rests in user awareness. Could it really be that simple?

Traditional security measures – such as firewalls, secure access points, passwords and remote device wipe – will always be essential to deflecting BYOD security threats. However, user awareness “might be the most important non-hardware, non-software solution available,” according to Ken Hess of ZDNet.

Image complements of RainKing

According to Hess’s assessment, “An informed user is a user who behaves more responsibly and takes fewer risks with valuable company data, including email. Not only does user education make the user aware of all the potential dangers of mobile computing, it also places a lot of the responsibility for corporate security onto the user. And that’s a good thing.”

Pointing out that user awareness is critical for BYOD management and security sounds obvious but most organizations underestimate its importance. No matter how many policies and security defenses IT implements, outsiders will eventually find a way to steal your business IP if naïve employees are careless with mobile devices. Consider the following questions:

• Do your employees store and send sensitive data on their smart phones and tablets?
• Are you confident that every corporate employee with a mobile device has acceptable remote-wipe and password protection?
• Do all of your employees understand the risks associated with Wi-Fi hot spots and malware?

You may not have detailed answers, but unless your responses are a confident: No, Yes and Yes, you need to add regular user education to your BYOD security measures. To make this education effort successful, we recommend that you deliver straightforward, minimally technical, step-by-step information that shows users how to protect themselves and your company. Be sure to remind users that their personal information is also at risk.

Network Monitoring systems are a must-have for organizations of all sizes. When evaluating solutions focus is often placed on comparing features and ease of use, but understanding the total cost of ownership is very important. The core licensing structure, whether it is device-based, port- or interface-based, or measurement-based, can have a big impact on license costs up front and the administrative workload for maintaining the solution in production over the lifetime of the product.

Join Jim Frey, VP of Research, at Enterprise Management Associates and Brian M. Jacobs, Senior Product Manager, at Ipswitch – Network Management Division, as they discuss what you should know about licensing for network monitoring solutions.

This webinar will cover:

• Understanding the Cost of Enterprise Network Monitoring Tools
• Licensing Models – Similarities and Differences
• Choosing a Licensing Strategy That is Best for You
• An Example:  WhatsUp Gold Licensing Approach
• Case Studies:  Device-based Licensing Experiences
• Key Takeaways  and Q&A

Date and time:
Tuesday, April 2, 2013
10am US EST

Now you can isolate issues and resolve network and application problems before users are even aware anything is wrong. The new, easy to-use WhatsUp Application Performance Monitor, lets you diagnose and fix complex application performance problems quickly from within a unified dashboard.

Application Performance Monitor Highlights:
• Proactively alert and automatically repair potential problems before applications fail—to ensure continuous up-time with limited IT resources.
• Quickly identify root causes of application performance problems— across network, server or multi-tier application or component dependencies.
• Gain the valuable insight necessary to improve application availability and performance – through real time and historical reporting and analysis.

Join Brian M. Jacobs, Senior Product Manager, on Tuesday, March 26th as he demonstrates how easy it is to discover, map and monitor your network and applications with the WhatsUp Gold suite. Register now!

When you evaluate application performance monitoring solutions, comparing capabilities is one key part of the assessment. But it can be misleading. Many application performance monitoring solutions include features that, while interesting, are not critical to you. Sometimes the feature-rich solutions are more costly, complex, and difficult to implement than you want. But sometimes more affordable products include features that aren’t high priority to you. The cost isn’t itself the determinant of whether products have more features than you need; it’s more a question of how closely each solution fits your purpose.

Before you assess specific capabilities in solutions you are evaluating, it’s important to clarify and prioritize your goals:

Once you identify your highest priorities, the next step is to map them to specific product capabilities. For example, if improving your MTTR time is a top priority, you should look for monitoring products with strong capabilities for:

• Monitoring, alerting and reporting on an application’s entire IT service
• Allowing you to define critical application dependencies so you can find the root cause quickly
• Presenting one unified dashboard so you can see problems quickly and drill down to the root cause
• Letting you customize automated actions in response to specific conditions so issues can be detected and repairs made without delay
• Providing out-of-the-box reports so you can easily track metrics such as MTTR rates over time

If you also give a high priority to reducing user complaints, you’d need the first four of the above capabilities plus end user monitoring to alert and report on the effect of web application performance on user experience.

This exercise of documenting your prioritized goals and mapping them to product capabilities puts you in a better position to select a solution that will not disappoint.

Ipswitch Network Management Division is proud to announce that our award winning IT management solution WhatsUp Gold v16 is now offering its web interface in German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese, at no additional cost. Instructions to help you transition WhatsUp Gold from English to the language of your choice is available in Japanese, Chinese and Russian.

For more information and to download WhatsUp Gold v16 in your preferred language click here!

We are pleased to announce that WhatsUp Gold won Silver in the 2013 Redmond Reader’s Choice Awards Best of the Best for General Network Monitoring Tool.

“We are honored to receive this award from the Redmond community,” said Ennio Carboni, President and General Manager of Ipswitch’s Network Management Division. “We take pride in the fact that our network management tool, WhatsUp Gold, is an easy to use and cost-effective solution for organizations of all sizes and is viewed in the same class with enterprise solution providers.”

The winners of the General Network Monitoring Tool category are:

• GOLD: Cisco Syslog Analyzer
• SILVER: Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold
• BRONZE: IBM Tivoli NetView

The awards appear in the February issue and online.

Click here to see all of our awards.