Monitoring

Slack's ability to integrate with other applications and services makes it a great choice for IT teams to support their network monitoring needs.

Today’s tale from the front lines comes from a customer who manages a dispersed wireless network for a large U.S. city’s public school system.

When the new IT director for a major transportation company walked through the door on his first day, he knew in advance the big network monitoring headache he faced. He was joining a fast-growing company that supplies cargo containers used by ships, trains and trucks. To keep the containers moving, the 12-person IT team maintains a network of virtual and physical servers & desktops, spanning 12 locations, using more than 90 network devices, with about 150 active monitors and passive (SNMP trap) monitors.

It can be tempting to build your own DIY Network Monitoring solution, but what's the real cost of building and maintaining such a tool at scale?

Ever think you have an issue with the interface active monitor in WhatsUp Gold being added back to devices after being removed? This is in fact, working as intended. Let me explain why!

Selecting a network monitor solution should come down to value for most IT teams.

Taiwan-based KHS is one of the world's largest manufacturers of musical instruments with popular brands like Walden Guitars and Mapex Drums. The company's five business subsidiaries used to operate independently, each with its own IT team. KHS decided to centralize all IT operations at its headquarters which led to sorting out system integration and network troubleshooting. This major IT initiative included a data center virtualization project to standardize all Point of Sale (PoS) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems.

Panama is known for its sloths, but we can all agree no one likes slothy Internet and shoddy cable service.

Until a few years ago, most people thought of hackers as bright but maladjusted teenagers who mainly broke into networks for the fun of it. But now that hacking has gone big time, you're more likely to associate hacking with organized crime groups or "state actors."

When pilots talk about things getting busy in the cockpit, they mean something very specific: clanging alerts, paralyzing uncertainty and the ground getting closer.

In my opinion, geolocation or location-based data (call it what you will) is the most frustrating aspect of mobile device usage. Although I was unable to obtain prompt expert insights to aid story credibility, surely I can't be the only one that thinks in this manner?

The promises and challenges associated with the Internet of Things (IoT), the fragmentation of mobile devices at the workplace and the diverse applications and services we use to get our daily work done, are just some of the issues IT pros have to deal with these days.

Who among us can argue that automated network monitoring isn't necessary when you consider how much the role of IT has expanded in recent years? Uptime on workstations and servers has been relegated to a secondary role and is considered the norm. While enhancing business processes and functions has become more of a primary focus.

The Delta Airlines power outage that grounded thousands of flights across the country was attributed to their legacy systems. What could they have done to prevent it? A network monitoring tool would have pinpointed the source of the problem possibly before the outage happened or even in just minutes instead of the reported 30 minutes. It would have allowed Delta's IT team to be nimbler while they remediated the issue.

One of the biggest headaches for IT is dealing with intermittent network performance problems. These are the kinds of issues that boldly appear but soon vanish before the source can be pinpointed. Only to happen again and again, frustrating and random each time. In most cases, these network performance problems look like they could be rooted in a certain area when, in fact, they lie somewhere completely different.

I’ve been to many IT conferences over the years, some have been underwhelming, and some have been more than worth the trip. Cisco Live US 2016 last week in Las Vegas definitely falls into the latter category. And it’s certainly justified, grown men playing Pokémon Go aside. Our booth was “standing room only” from beginning to end and our conversations with our fellow IT brethren were very interesting and enlightening. Even Diglett stopped by to say hello.

Over the years IT pros have had to get used to less autonomy in terms of what touches their networks. Back in the day, IT loved RIM’s BlackBerrys because they were built for security. They never liked Apple iPhones. They were built for consumers, not IT security pros.

Navigating software licensing models has always been a challenge, but the rise of virtual computing and the cloud has made it even harder.

Vegas in July is kind of like a giant data center without AC.

Instead of sharing out each of my tips on enabling and configuring SNMP on Windows, Cisco, Linux, Unix and ESXi in separate posts, I've amassed them here for a one-stop-shop.