The Network Monitor

As a product manager of an integrated solution suite, it’s interesting to compare and contrast the similarities and differences between traditional systems management (OS deployment, inventory, software delivery, patching, monitoring) and its major trends (security, virtualization, cloud, efficient data centers) with network management (deployment and configuration, backup/restore, monitoring, traffic analysis, Quality of Service) and networking trends (mobile devices, cloud, virtualization, larger networking demands). There are many similarities between these two IT focus areas and I will “blog” about several aspects as I tie-in and compare systems management with network management over the next year. One similarity that is particularly easy to spot and “leaps off the page” for me relates to discovery. In fact, it ALL starts with discovery.

Who among us can argue that automated network monitoring isn't necessary when you consider how much the role of IT has expanded in recent years? Uptime on workstations and servers has been relegated to a secondary role and is considered the norm. While enhancing business processes and functions has become more of a primary focus.

Maintaining a work-life balance is extremely difficult for some – especially network managers who are on-call 24/7. A great article titled Mobile Network Management Smartphone Apps for On-the-Go Engineers on SearchNetworking.com got us thinking about all the ways network management software for smartphones and tablets helps make network managers’ lives easier and achieve that work-life balance we all try so hard to maintain.

Wigs on the network? This is technology that will affect networks I surely couldn't have predicted a few years ago.

Many organizations that rely on Amazon Web Services (AWS) aren't doing the best job tracking their AWS resource usage and spending– they just pay the monthly bill from Amazon. Unless that bill significantly increases, they have no incentive to determine if they’re really using all those resources or if they’re being accurately billed. But they should be— many companies pay an average of 36% more for cloud services than they need to, according to one report.

Other's have already done it for you?

By the time a network manager at a Midwestern U.S. non-profit organization called us for help, his 5 year-old wireless infrastructure was buckling under BYOD. Employees trying to work during lunch were complaining that their applications were slowing or even failing to operate.

From IT to marketing, cloud computing has revolutionized the way the world does business. We now a maintenance-free to get unlimited scalability and reliability, and we’re all going to live happily ever after, right?

Monitoring traffic and bandwidth usage across LAN links is an essential part of ensuring optimal network performance.

In a complex network environment, traditional methods for application monitoring can be cumbersome, complicated, or even inefficient.

If you are reading this, you are likely interested in or already utilize cloud solutions. Both Azure and AWS (Amazon Web Services) offer a variety of infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS) offerings. Selection between the two, with AWS the dominant market leader, is typically based on business requirements and online research or direct referrals (some of your contacts recommend a solution based on pricing, uptime or other). I could rehash vendor websites, favorable reviews, and other somewhat biased materials to prove the headline but, as always, I prefer to go my own route, bringing my own biases to the fore.

As you've likely already heard on Sept 24th a new computer security threat called Shellshock was identified and entered into the National Vulnerability Database as CVE-2014-7169.

Here at Ipswitch I have the pleasure of working closely with U.S. Government agencies to help them sort out their most pressing network monitoring challenges. Government IT pros know they need tools to monitor their networks but have a difficult time choosing one. And once they buy what seems right, it can end up costing even more time and money trying to get it to work right.

Our Hero, the SysAdmin

It doesn’t take a ninja to know that Simple Network Management Protocol allows administrators to monitor network-attached devices. That said, you might actually need to be a ninja to enable and configure SNMP on Windows, Linux/Unix, Cisco, and ESXi.

Monitoring bandwidth usage is a vital aspect of any network management strategy. Bandwidth monitors collect, monitor and analyze network traffic volume by end-point (user), port, interface and protocol (application). This information enables IT Admins to:

As I watched Star Trek Beyond in the theater, I couldn’t help but relate working on an IT team to working on the USS Enterprise. All that they endure in this latest installment is metaphorical to everything IT does for a business. It’s easy for IT teams to fall apart when team members lose themselves, due to selfishness or burnout. It’s equally important for IT to keep the ship (or USS Enterprise) in running order. The movie evens starts with Kirk feeling bored and disassociated with his current job after being in space for 995 days, something which IT pros can all relate. "The grind", as we like to call it.

With WhatsUp Gold 2018 network monitoring software, 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.

Since the World Cup first kicked-off back on June 12^th, we have been covering its impact on application performance and business operations. We asked: would an increase in streaming of the world’s most watched event have an adverse effect on application performance? Now that the Cup is over and Germany beat out Argentina, yes, we can say that network and application performance suffered over the past month. Blame it on Rio.

If you’ve ever said that or even thought it, then you know exactly how much fun taking inventory is. Or is not, rather. Every industry requires periodic asset inventory – that’s just a fact of life.