General IT

I just read an article published by CNBC online about the chaos caused by BYOD in the workplace, and completely agree.

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.

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.

The past two weeks have been a whirlwind for the Network Management division as we launched v16. We finally have a chance to look back on all we’ve accomplished – including a fantastic PC Magazine review.

Last week Ipswitch’s IT team initiated moving its product download server to a Cloud offering with more bandwidth for growing capacity. However, before committing to this major change, IT decided to globally test the downloads of both servers, in order to determine whether or not the new Cloud platform could indeed offer Ipswitch greater resiliency and  download speed – in addition to higher bandwidth to support an increase in expected download traffic. Establishing a performance baseline was IT’s first task, and was simplified with AlertFox’s ability to create 15-minute test sensors from US, Asia, and Europe. Using AlertFox, IT was able to proactively identify the minimum, average, and maximum response time with timely emails and reports.

My – how research has changed in the 20 years I have been working in IT and high-tech! Normally, you would have to scour reams and reams of articles in trade rags delivered via snail mail to find information relevant to your work. Now we have the ability to set alerts, custom feeds and create targeted searches to find many more ‘diamonds in the rough’ than was even possible 10 years ago.

As a product manager of an integrated solution suite, it’s interesting to compare and contrast the similarities and differences between traditional systems management (OS deployment, inventory, software delivery, patching, monitoring) and its major trends (security, virtualization, cloud, efficient data centers) with network management (deployment and configuration, backup/restore, monitoring, traffic analysis, Quality of Service) and networking trends (mobile devices, cloud, virtualization, larger networking demands). There are many similarities between these two IT focus areas and I will “blog” about several aspects as I tie-in and compare systems management with network management over the next year. One similarity that is particularly easy to spot and “leaps off the page” for me relates to discovery. In fact, it ALL starts with discovery.

I'm sure many of you opened your browser to Google this morning to see the capitol of Kansas replace the search giant's name.

The Basics of WMI and Why You Need to Monitor It

There has been a lot of buzz around WAN optimization over the past few months, with numerous mentions of what WAN optimization is and what it brings to the table. On the surface, it is certainly a cool technology, but it is a technology that requires some additional thought before implementing. It is certainly another great tool in the network managers arsenal.