The Network Monitor

Device Roles that will make your life easier in the long run by giving you consistency in monitoring across your infrastructure.

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.

For the past few years, the tech industry has become fixated on kicking off the new year with a festival of connected devices at the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. The fact that this show has become so significant to the tech industry is another indication of the potential importance of the ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) and growing impact of the ‘consumerization of IT’ on the way IT is adopted and managed.

Convenience stores are the fast way for folks on the road to run in, grab what they need and be off to the next stop in their busy days. But when a regional convenience store chain known for its speedy service found itself spending as much as 6 hours to recover from fairly frequent failures of DVR servers used to help secure its stores, they gave Ipswitch’s network monitoring division a call.

 Sometimes scripting takes the Ninja kind of patience.

Disclaimer: Azure Monitor’s official documentation is more than 2700 pages of fascinating material. Azure Application Insights is a small part of it. Given the variety of nodes, features, apps and development methods in an Azure infrastructure, app and performance monitoring objectives can be achieved in many ways. This article focuses on Application Insights only.

Last Friday was Sysadmin Day (or, System Administrator Appreciation Day in full form), an annual day of recognition for hard working sysadmins. It was created by sysadmin Ted Kekatos in 2009 after being inspired by an HP ad promoting LaserJet 400 printers where a sysadmin was celebrated by colleagues. For context and the full story, check out this 2011 interview with Ted by Spicehead Nic Tolstoshev.

There are all kinds of potential IT emergencies out there that we should always be prepared for, network outages, system failures and data breaches come to mind as examples. However, there is another phenomenon that is starting to creep its way into enterprise networks: the zombie apocalypse. While it may sound like the plot of a B-level, made-for-cable Halloween movie, Network Zombies have quickly asserted themselves as the most troublesome nemesis to the modern-day IT administrator. They are dangerous and unpredictable, and without the right approach these zombies can cause downtime and lost productivity. However by adopting an approach that generates greater levels of network visibility, IT departments can effectively neutralize zombie problems once and for all.

With WhatsUp Gold 2018, you have the ability to customize the view of a dashboard and this is the information you as a user want to be able to look at on a daily or a weekly basis.

When troubleshooting problems or investigating potential security breaches, the Windows event log is a great place to start. Windows provides an extensive list of various event logs grouped by a provider with a sometimes staggering number of events recorded within. With all of these events being recorded, it's hard to figure out what's going on. One way to search event logs across not one but hundreds of servers at once is with PowerShell.

Your IT infrastructure is ready to make the big move—from on-premises to the public cloud. Or perhaps you’re already in the cloud, but it’s time for a change to a new platform provider.

Imagine if your WhatsUp Gold expert simply stopped showing up for work. What’s your Plan B? What is your backup plan for their sudden or even planned absence?

Ipswitch Innovate Virtual Summit will be here before you know it. Between now and the kickoff on Wednesday, October 21, I’ll continue to preview our sessions to be presented by eight customers and Ipswitch experts. Today brings us a best practices story by Michael Roth, the senior systems engineer at University of North Georgia. His talk is called “Inventory Automation with WUG.” (WUG is shorthand for WhatsUp Gold, in case you didn't already know.)

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.

In many jurisdictions, there is a legislative or accounting requirement to store data for a minimum of five years. Easier said than done. That's why multiple data backups are necessary.

We are pleased to announce that WhatsUp Gold won Silver in the 2013 Redmond Reader’s Choice Awards Best of the Best for General Network Monitoring Tool.

Today’s tale from the front lines of network monitoring comes to us from Joe, a network administrator from an electronics company that was growing fast. When he started his new job he was surprised to find that the company  used what he called a “primitive” system for communication between the help desk and the IT operations network monitoring team.

If you’re an online retailer or any organization with an e-commerce presence, the quality of your buyers’ online experience on Cyber Monday can make the difference between a sale and an abandoned shopping cart. The only way you can keep the transactions flowing is to be the first to know of your website's performance problems, well before your customers do.

I had recently become a substitute teacher at a Boston-area high school and one morning not a single sophomore showed up for my sociology class. The French teacher in the classroom next to mine explained that MCAS season was upon us and educators in non-essential subjects are effectively ignored for the next three weeks while the students crammed like mad.

Network Monitoring tools are a must-have for organizations of all sizes. When evaluating solutions focus is often placed on comparing features and ease of use, but understanding the total cost of ownership is very important. The core licensing structure, whether it is device-based, port- or interface-based, or measurement-based, can have a big impact on license costs up front and the administrative workload for maintaining the solution in production over the lifetime of the product.