Monitoring

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?

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 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.

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.

Your first exposure to any tool can be daunting to say the least. In the instance of WhatsUp Gold, we strive to make that initial process of implementing IT monitoring as simple and smooth as possible. With some guidance you can harness the flexibility of this powerful tool fairly quickly, because we know that you don’t have time to be dealing with large learning curves.

Picture this: Someone in your office decided to buy a new app. Maybe they told you about it ahead of time, maybe not. While you may rightfully assume this is a responsibility of an application development team, app monitoring often falls to sysadmins or network admins. Either way, if you develop an informal application footprint, you can save yourself headaches later. The seven tips below can get you started in developing a footprint for the application. They'll make you a smarter user of your network monitoring tool if the app ever strays into rogue territory.

Understanding exactly what’s happening on your network in real-time through network visualization and analysis can give you the insight to shrink big problems into little, manageable ones.

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.

How much time have you spent on Windows log management and analysis lately? Not much? No time for it? Allow me to help. Log management and analysis doesn’t take as much time as you think, and you can solve network problems and boost security and compliance while you're at it.

Michael Roth, senior systems engineer, at the University of North Georgia (UNG) is proud to tell his tale about how his team chose automation over IT complexity by changing a manual network inventory process across the school’s 5 campuses.

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.

If data is the lifeblood of a company, bandwidth is the diameter of the veins through which this data travels. Cheesy medical analogies aside, a blockage or high-pressure bandwidth usage results in issues that compromise the integrity of your office wall to wall.