Monitoring

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.

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.

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.

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 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.