The Network Monitor

Halloween represents the time of year that we embrace ghouls and ghosts, celebrate the macabre, and eat too much candy. This coming Thursday I’ll be greeted at my front door by trick or treat’ers, lined up for their packaged sugar rushes. In between trips to the check out the little ghosts and ghouls, I'll be watching one of my favorite horror movies. For me, being scared is part of the fun.

I just read an article published by CNBC online about the chaos caused by BYOD in the workplace, and completely agree.

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.

Today’s tale from the front lines of network monitoring comes to us from a network administrator at a large electronic invoicing company in Mexico. His company serves large multinational corporations as well as thousands of medium and small clients. His task is to keep Microsoft Exchange up and running at peak performance levels to ensure quick invoice delivery.

Today’s tale from the front lines of network monitoring comes to us from Edgar, a systems administrator at a bank in Northern Europe. Edgar has been at the bank long enough to know the systems inside and out, but his expertise was challenged each time the bank acquired a smaller bank or merged with a rival. The new banks had different systems and plenty of custom applications.    

Servers, networks and applications aren’t the only remote devices that some companies need to manage. Did you know WhatsUp Gold can also monitor point-of-sale devices such as vending machines, in-store video games and ticket turnstiles? In fact, any device that supports ping, SNMP or WMI management protocols.

Today’s tale from the front lines of network management comes to us from a company that’s been in business for eleven decades. They’re a logistics company with offices around the U.S. And they literally started with a horse and a cart. They have bought several companies along the way, keep their eyes on the future, and learned the value of technologies that help them grow.

The IT life was simpler when employees each had one desktop computer and one landline phone. Technology did not move. It was stationary. Nowadays we have laptops, smart phones, and tablets that are both mobile and connected. And they have no wires. You are told that applications are mission critical,  expected to be accessible by people at a speed that optimizes productivity, and available to people inside and outside the organization. And who else wants access all the time? Hackers and other online criminals. As if you had enough to worry about.

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.

Now you can isolate issues and resolve network and application problems before users are even aware anything is wrong. The new, easy to-use WhatsUp Application Performance Monitor, lets you diagnose and fix complex application performance problems quickly from within a unified dashboard.

When you evaluate application performance monitoring solutions, comparing capabilities is one key part of the assessment. But it can be misleading. Many application performance monitoring solutions include features that, while interesting, are not critical to you. Sometimes the feature-rich solutions are more costly, complex, and difficult to implement than you want. But sometimes more affordable products include features that aren’t high priority to you. The cost isn’t itself the determinant of whether products have more features than you need; it’s more a question of how closely each solution fits your purpose.

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.

If you're over budget this year, your BYOD policy may be to blame.

The past two weeks have been a whirlwind for the Network Management division as we launched v16. We finally have a chance to look back on all we’ve accomplished – including a fantastic PC Magazine review.

Last week Ipswitch’s IT team initiated moving its product download server to a Cloud offering with more bandwidth for growing capacity. However, before committing to this major change, IT decided to globally test the downloads of both servers, in order to determine whether or not the new Cloud platform could indeed offer Ipswitch greater resiliency and  download speed – in addition to higher bandwidth to support an increase in expected download traffic. Establishing a performance baseline was IT’s first task, and was simplified with AlertFox’s ability to create 15-minute test sensors from US, Asia, and Europe. Using AlertFox, IT was able to proactively identify the minimum, average, and maximum response time with timely emails and reports.

There is a common misconception that BYOD will be the savior of IT budget troubles; however, it’s not always as cost-effective as it seems. According to Aberdeen, enterprises spend an extra $170,000 per year to deploy 1,000 mobile devices via BYOD. A typical BYOD model costs 33% more than the traditional corporate-wireless model.

When I talk about BYOD with other IT pros, I get flashbacks of 2009 when the ‘cloud’ first became a hot topic. Security and costs are the top concerns, but few people understand the importance of monitoring and measuring the impact on the network, and why it matters.

My – how research has changed in the 20 years I have been working in IT and high-tech! Normally, you would have to scour reams and reams of articles in trade rags delivered via snail mail to find information relevant to your work. Now we have the ability to set alerts, custom feeds and create targeted searches to find many more ‘diamonds in the rough’ than was even possible 10 years ago.

Hey folks, this is Brian M. Jacobs, Senior Product Manager for the WhatsUp Gold family of network management products.  I would like to let you know that a security researcher (who has been a big fan of WhatsUp Gold for many years) has informed us of a SQL injection vulnerability in the WhatsUp Gold v15.0.2 product.  This vulnerability involves WhatsUp Gold running in a default deployment, in which administrators have privileged access to the database instance.  For customers who wish to restrict access to their database, we already provide the capability to configure WhatsUp Gold to run with reduced database privileges.  Details on how to implement reduced privilege operation can be found in our Database Migration and Management Guide.  Based on our customers' input, we are also working on security patches to limit all SQL injection related vulnerabilities, regardless of database privilege level.

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?