The Network Monitor

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.

Log Management is a hot topic these days, especially in the way it pertains to organizational data security. So in this episode of Defrag This, your host Mark Towler sits down with Jim Cashman to quiz the latter on his sysadmin experience with Log Management.

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.

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.

The Super Bowl is over and hockey playoffs are still weeks away, but many Americans will still get their interim fix during March Madness. The prelims went underway on March 15th, and a huge cross-section of the American workforce faces a challenge: making sure they don't miss a single foul shot, even during business hours.

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.

Unfortunately, no one template can guarantee 100-percent system stability. There are, however, guidelines any sysadmin can follow to define policies and procedures that proactively ensure your network doesn't have a random fire drill.

For home users, monitoring bandwidth usage per device may seem like a pointless exercise but their business counterparts typically recognize the value of doing so. Bandwidth is not a limitless resource and total broadband bandwidth (as provided by your internet service provider or ISP) is shared between all the devices connected to the network.

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.

I was asked recently to speak on a panel entitled “What IT Skills/Roles Should Reside in the Business” Premier CIO Forum in Boston. The event, held earlier this week, was a well-attended and engaging event supported by SIM (Society for Information Management). There was an impressive roster of IT executives from across New England.

Interesting thing virtualization, everyone is talking about it and lots of IT professionals are investigating it and quite a few are implementing it.

Did you know that this year the number of Wi-Fi connected devices will exceed the world’s population? With the growing number of Wi-Fi connected devices, there have been more and more public Wi-Fi networks created. Nowadays, whether you are in a coffee shop or train station, there is probably a public Wi-Fi in your general area.