The Network Monitor

“If there’s one thing I hate the most, it’s software licensing.” This was said to me, unprompted, by my friend Janine who works in government. She managed operations at large federal organization and handled budget items in the billions of dollars each year. But her biggest hassle was dealing with how her vendors handled software licensing.

For most IT organizations, the network monitoring tool is an essential, even central part of the IT toolkit. Network monitoring tools play an important role in letting IT pros know where issues exist before helpdesk tickets start coming in, keeping the IT team aware of problems with service, networks, application performance, and more.

Keeping tabs on what a script is doing is critical for monitoring and debugging.

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.)

As it grows, your company will probably have an emergency at some point that warrants crisis management in IT. No matter if it's a data breach, natural disaster or product malfunction, you're usually the first blamed for its occurrence and the last credited with resolution. Even in the case of a weather event, sysadmins take the hot seat if user machines aren't up and running quickly. But as they say, people don't remember the mistake — they remember how you handled it.

Some say this is the year of BYOD management. Great news for businesses seeking to reduce costs and further enslave employees, but a little biased perhaps?

Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is a standard set of communication rules, that is, a protocol. This protocol governs the main way for querying and monitoring the hardware and software on a computer network.

WhatsUp Gold can monitor every single part of your network to give you a wealth of information on status, performance, traffic and thousands of other metrics. And now WhatsUp Gold can share that information directly with any of your systems thanks to our new REST API.

The IPv6 protocol has consistently made it into top-10 and tech-prediction lists for years now but, as noted by Wired, IPv4 addresses are finally drying up.

According to the SANS Institute, Port Scanning is one of the most popular techniques attackers use to discover services that they can exploit to break into systems. In this article, we will discuss some best practices you can employ to defend against attackers and prevent potential network breaches.

For most IT organizations, network monitoring is an essential tool. Network monitoring tools play an important role in letting IT pros get complete visibility into the status of network devices, systems, and applications, keeping the IT team aware of problems with services, networks, application performance, and more.

A multinational office furniture and design company came to us with a problem. Their Internet service costs were skyrocketing and they didn't know why. They had over 60 flow sources across North America and Asia. And they had little to no visibility into their network traffic and bandwidth utilization.

What's on your IT wish list?

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.

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

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 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.