The Network Monitor

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.

Today, WhatsUp Gold introduces cloud monitoring and enhances storage monitoring capabilities. Service packs are meant to address issues or bugs, but this service pack is actually packed full of new features!

At the occasion of this PICNIC episode, we talk about IT Operations Attributes and answer questions regarding modern IT operations.

With the advent of BYOD, it seems like just yesterday that a new mobile movement was making waves through enterprise organizations across the globe. BYOD offers new opportunities for increased productivity, but it also raises a slew of difficult security questions. While many IT pros are still wading through the repercussions of this mobile onslaught, a fresh, new user revolution is creating similar buzz (and similar problems).

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?

Defrag This has covered machine learning and AI at a higher level—but never before have we had the chance to dive into how autonomous applications work by design.

For sysadmins and other IT pros, Halloween plays itself out all year long with all sorts of network nightmares and stranger things that can turn any server room into a house of horrors.

Technology in the financial sector, otherwise known as fintech, has matured at an impressive rate in recent months. Much of this progress can be directly attributed to growing interest from brick-and-mortar banks. In fact, these pillars of the financial sector have raised $14.6 billion in venture capital last year for a tech movement that some thought might herald the end of traditional banking. Despite the sometimes contentious relationship, banks are clearly seeing promise in financial technology as it continues to evolve. With that in mind, here are a few ways banks are currently using this innovative technology.

The air you breathe has a direct impact on health and depending on the pollutants, a variety of health issues can result, such as respiratory ailments.

“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.

Due to unplanned service interruptions, all IT teams must spend some time fixing problems and preparing for future issues. It’s inevitable.

The IoT in healthcare can absolutely help make people more proactive about their health and provide physicians with better information, but it also becomes a nightmare to manage all this data and move it from device to device.

A network isn’t just a technology backbone that supports a business. It is the business. When networks, servers or apps fail, things can come to a full stop. That is, except help desk tickets. Those will start showing up like a flash mob, descending upon the IT team full of complaints and concerns that take up time needed to solve the problem. It’s a vicious cycle that no IT pro wants to deal with.

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.

If you hadn’t heard, there is a fatal clock flaw that is effecting Cisco and Juniper routers and switches with the Intel Atom C2000 chip. Cisco has recently released a statement on the issue:

On this sixth episode of the Data Transfer Show, Shawn Kyle Bowman, network administrator at the Lebanon School District in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, will give you the ins and outs of IT in the education field.

Dennis Hoshield, Network Infrastructure Engineer at Wayne State University, discusses his positive experience using the new and revamped WhatsUp Gold 2017 Plus.

In this episode of Defrag This, monitoring expert, author, and founder of Aster Labs, Mike Julian discusses his upcoming book, Practical Monitoring, Effective Strategies in the Real World.