Monitoring

Having a large number of network monitoring tools that only provide a partial view of your end-to-end environment is like five people with in the dark trying to describe an elephant by touching only a single body part.

 Sometimes scripting takes the Ninja kind of patience.

Most IT teams don’t have the budget or resources to satisfy the growing demands of their users. The demand comes in many forms, such as bandwidth consumption, Wi-Fi access, power utilization, and storage capacity; just to name a few.

The Super Bowl is over and hockey playoffs are still weeks away, but many Americans will still get their interim fix during March Madness. The prelims went underway on March 15th, and a huge cross-section of the American workforce faces a challenge: making sure they don't miss a single foul shot, even during business hours.

As Isocrates once said, “It’s important to know where you’re going than to get there quickly.” If you’d like to integrate WhatsUpGold network reporting software with Google Maps, here’s how you get there. And it hopefully shouldn’t take you long to do it.

I haven’t been at Ipswitch long, but reading about OfCom opening up BT’s network to rivals got me thinking. While BT has avoided an AT&T-like break-up (for now) the ramifications of this are going to make a lot of people either happy or angry – or even both. In theory, rural, underserved customers will enjoy great access and third-party providers will be able to compete on a level playing field.

CROUS Paris provides education and housing services to more than 300,000 students over 80 locations in France. Each year, its 750 employees prepare five million meals, find housing for 6,000 students and process 60,000 scholarship applications. In order to support such a high volume of activity on a network with more than 1000 different IT devices, Mr. Yu, Information Systems Director at CROUS Paris, needed an infrastructure monitoring solution.

Predicting the future isn't a perfect practice without a DeLorean. For support desks at SMBs, however, determining network bandwidth needs down the line is critical to sustained growth. The farmer's almanac may not cover network environments, but with a few helpful tips, you'll gain much-needed perspective on how to plan for current and eventual system requirements.

"The story of the blind men and an elephant originated in the Indian subcontinent from where it has widely diffused. It is a story of a group of blind men (or men in the dark) who touch an elephant to learn what it is like. Each one feels a different part, but only one part, such as the side or the tusk. They then compare notes and learn that they are in complete disagreement." (Source: Wikipedia)

Do you get bogged down trying to both maintain sufficient performance across your Microsoft applications, while troubleshooting related problems as they happen? If so, here are seven tips that will help you manage your software from Redmond:

In the early years of IT, data was stored on paper tapes

In my last post on the Ipswitch blog, I described how the Internet of Things (IoT) will change the nature of the IT team's role and responsibilities. The primary purpose of initiating an IoT strategy is to capture data from a broader population of product endpoints. As a result, IoT deployments are also creating a new set of application performance management (APM) and infrastructure monitoring requirements.

IT teams work valiantly behind the scenes every day to make sure their digital businesses stay connected.

Spotify recommends the next album you should play. Twitter customizes moments and stories you should be reading. The flash sale site Gilt personalizes online shopping down to your favorite brands and discounts. The best experiences on the Web and mobile apps involve clean design, interesting details and intuitive interactions. When companies strive to offer this experience in their apps, they often turn to the LAMP stack for enablement.

In July this year, a computer fault forced United Airlines to ground its flights in the US for the second time in a matter of weeks. The problem, it turned out, was a ‘network connectivity’ issue caused by a computer router malfunction.

When you think of best practices in IT, what comes to mind first? Maintaining a very solid security posture? Sure, that’s a big one. But what about IT asset management? (Or IT inventory management, as the case may be.) If you don’t know what's attached to you network you're likely a lot less secure than you think.

In July of this year, Enterprise Management Associates published a landscape review entitled EMA Enterprise Network Availability Monitoring Systems (ENAMS) Radar Report 2014.  A blog post written by my colleague Jim Frey on the EMA site reviews the scope and objectives of the report.  The study covered Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold version 16, along with sixteen other ENAMS from fifteen other vendors.

Congratulations to the UCONN Huskies, the NCAA March Madness champs! It's always exciting when the underdog prevails. When the odds are stacked against you, as an IT pro, that is, you need to be prepared to manage through a bunch of problems that can make life difficult.

The goal of every NCAA March Madness team is to reach the Final Four. The experts say this validates the season and makes it a success. Yet, is it enough to just get there? Or does true satisfaction only come when the confetti drops and you are the last team standing? We’ve had a heck of a tournament thus far and it's a shame only one team will win, but that’s just the way the bracket goes. (If you are wondering what this is about, check here for the full Ipswitch Madness.)

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