The Network Monitor

Providing fast access to applications and data while protecting digital assets are the two biggest challenges faced by network administrators. Performance and security represent the two-pronged mission that administrators find themselves facing every day.

Your IT infrastructure is ready to make the big move—from on-premises to the public cloud. Or perhaps you’re already in the cloud, but it’s time for a change to a new platform provider.

Many organizations that rely on Amazon Web Services (AWS) aren't doing the best job tracking their AWS resource usage and spending– they just pay the monthly bill from Amazon. Unless that bill significantly increases, they have no incentive to determine if they’re really using all those resources or if they’re being accurately billed. But they should be— many companies pay an average of 36% more for cloud services than they need to, according to one report.

As IT pros already know, when we speak of ports, we mean the 16-bit virtual ports used when interconnecting systems i.e. during communication over protocols such as TCP or UDP and not physical connections on the system such as USB, HDMI etc. See the OSI model and list of port numbers and their assigned function if not an IT pro. Port 80 is commonly used for HTTP activity, for example, and many applications communicate using assigned default ports.

Last month, we released WhatsUp Gold 2019.1, and with it, the addition of a powerful REST API that lets you easily integrate other systems or your own scripts with WUG.

With the new REST API, you can now use an extensive range of REST API calls to get data from WhatsUp Gold from other systems, or input data to WhatsUp Gold or have other systems make changes. The result is a huge range of automation use cases that will help IT teams be faster and more efficient. Example use cases include the ability to automatically put devices in maintenance mode before making changes, the ability to add or remove devices and monitors automatically, and more.

Wouldn't it be great if you could get an automatic alert every time something in your house or car broke, like when a spark plug or fuse failed, or when a light bulb went out? That way you could fix those problems before they caused you any trouble... If only. For most of us, the prospect of such a smart home is still a distant glimmer in the future, but for IT teams (and others) working in a modern enterprise, you can get automatic notifications when parts of your infrastructure fail, and you can fix those failures before they cause problems. How? With the IT swiss army knife/ticketing system known as ServiceNow.

In many jurisdictions, there is a legislative or accounting requirement to store data for a minimum of five years. Easier said than done. That's why multiple data backups are necessary.

Scanning ports is very popular among cybercriminals. It’s often their first step of reconnaissance to discover services they can exploit and systems they can break into as they try to steal or destroy sensitive data. Two recent examples of major breaches illustrate just how handy port scanning is to threat actors:

Disclaimer: Azure Monitor’s official documentation is more than 2700 pages of fascinating material. Azure Application Insights is a small part of it. Given the variety of nodes, features, apps and development methods in an Azure infrastructure, app and performance monitoring objectives can be achieved in many ways. This article focuses on Application Insights only.

WhatsUp Gold can monitor every single part of your network to give you a wealth of information on status, performance, traffic and thousands of other metrics. And now WhatsUp Gold can share that information directly with any of your systems thanks to our new REST API.

It’s 2:00 a.m. in the United States: Can your employees and customers in Europe and Asia access the applications running in your Microsoft Azure cloud? If you’re not sure on a 24x7 basis what the status is of your Azure servers and applications, it’s time to invest in a third-party monitoring tool.

Despite being an essential piece of the Sysadmin toolbox, Network performance management (NPM) can be a bit of a mystery for many IT professionals.

In 2019, cloud computing hasn’t just hit the mainstream, it is the mainstream. In fact, some experts are predicting that upwards of 80% of enterprise workloads will live in the cloud by 2020.

If you are reading this, you are likely interested in or already utilize cloud solutions. Both Azure and AWS (Amazon Web Services) offer a variety of infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS) offerings. Selection between the two, with AWS the dominant market leader, is typically based on business requirements and online research or direct referrals (some of your contacts recommend a solution based on pricing, uptime or other). I could rehash vendor websites, favorable reviews, and other somewhat biased materials to prove the headline but, as always, I prefer to go my own route, bringing my own biases to the fore.

DevOps as a practice and philosophy includes the communication and teamwork between developers and IT operations. Traditionally, developers and operations are two very different teams who would point fingers when issues would arise with software. DevOps is an attempt to abolish this and has both teams work together. The business result of this is a more stable and reliable software to provide to customers.

Over the past week, news broke about a rogue device that had gone unnoticed on NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) IT network. The fact that a Raspberry Pi went unnoticed for almost 10 months is a clear signal of network management issues and lackluster security policies in place within NASA, and other government agencies for that matter.

When troubleshooting problems or investigating potential security breaches, the Windows event log is a great place to start. Windows provides an extensive list of various event logs grouped by a provider with a sometimes staggering number of events recorded within. With all of these events being recorded, it's hard to figure out what's going on. One way to search event logs across not one but hundreds of servers at once is with PowerShell.

Working in a DevOps environment, agility is everything. That next release needs to get into production quickly, so even a minor network issue can hamper speed and efficiency.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) have simply become a fact of life for most IT organizations. The benefits of outsourcing networking to Amazon’s cloud are simply too obvious to ignore or to not take advantage of.

As a previous sufferer of imposter syndrome, I understand what it's like to feel like you're living someone else's remarkable life doing what someone else should be doing; but not me.