The Network Monitor

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 future of IT will be molded not just by technology, but also by changing expectations and attitudes toward support's role within the organization.

As you may already know, there was a recent Security Advisory about new vulnerabilities in OpenSSL released in early June. This specific flaw requires a vulnerable OpenSSL library active on both the client and server ends of the transaction. The flaw allows a savvy attacker to sit between the client and server and turn off encryption, silently exposing information exchanged between those two end points. Technologies that only use OpenSSL to accept web-browser (HTTPS) connections will be vulnerable to this flaw only when the browser is using a vulnerable version of OpenSSL. Chrome for Android is the only major browser that is currently susceptible.

Cloud computing is a ready-made revolution for SMBs. Forget about server downtime; elastic computing and API-driven development is perfect for smaller organizations with project funding in the mere thousands of dollars.

With the latest release of WhatsUp Gold, we've addedcloud performance monitoring and the ability to track virtual resource usage, so that you always know how much you're spending on cloud services such as Azure and AWS. In this video from Ipswitch contributor Adam Bertram, we'll cover how to use WhatsUp Gold 2018 to monitor Azure VMs.

For years, there have been concerns of the Chinese government building backdoors and spying capabilities in to phones and hardware built on their soil, and now it seems those concerns are coming to head with a recent Bloomberg story that alleges that Chinese government agents installed thousands of spy chips into servers used by Amazon, Apple, and the US government. How true are these allegations, are our servers safe? In this article, we’ll attempt to figure out what—if anything—happened, and how IT pros should react.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Our Hero, the SysAdmin