The Network Monitor

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.

The NCAA March Madness tournament is officially underway, and players and coaches aren’t the only ones who need to be ready.  With a majority of the initial games taking place during business hours, IT departments across every industry know that this means increased stress on the network and decreased employee productivity. Last year, March Madness Live delivered an unprecedented 64 million live video streams, which netted out to about 13.5 million hours of live video consumption.

Navigating software licensing models has always been a challenge, but the rise of virtual computing and the cloud has made it even harder.

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.

We're excited to announce WhatsUp Gold 2018 (WUG 2018)! The new version brings cloud performance monitoring and the ability to track virtual resource usage. Now you always know how much you're spending on cloud services such as Azure and AWS.

Users are part of any network and while sometimes troublesome, it’s the responsibility of the IT admin team to ensure that users can access only the resources necessary to perform their roles. The receptionist has no need to access software project data and software developers have no interest in HR resources. Therefore, user permissions are necessary.

Over the past week, news broke about a rogue device that had gone unnoticed on NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) IT network. The fact that a Raspberry Pi went unnoticed for almost 10 months is a clear signal of network management issues and lackluster security policies in place within NASA, and other government agencies for that matter.

IT is a pretty thankless job; long hours to deploy technology that's often invisible to the average user isn't exactly an ego boost as you leave work every night. But for every moment of sheer frustration — and they are many — there's a much lighter side to support, affectionately called "information technology humor." Cue canned laughter.

Ipswitch has continued to roll out enhancements of WhatsUp Gold 2018 with the release of the third WhatsUp Gold update of the year.

Today's tale from the front lines of IT comes from a customer who works at a global conferencing company. His firm's customers use online services that require real-time responsiveness for video and voice. So it was a shock when a playback service for recorded calls was suddenly afflicted by sporadic slowdowns several months after its launch. It pitched users into a black hole of lost recorded conference calls.

The Delta Airlines power outage that grounded thousands of flights across the country was attributed to their legacy systems. What could they have done to prevent it? A network monitoring tool would have pinpointed the source of the problem possibly before the outage happened or even in just minutes instead of the reported 30 minutes. It would have allowed Delta's IT team to be nimbler while they remediated the issue.

In the early days of public education, and even in some rural areas today, multiple grades were taught in a single classroom. As challenging as that environment was for teachers, today's pedagogues find themselves in a similar situation, but now they're better equipped to handle it with the help of ed-tech tools. Teachers today may have classes full of kids with learning needs as diverse as the kids in the one-room schoolhouse, but with modern technology they can meet those needs and help children develop to their full potential.

Improper configuration changes to a network—or even just one server on a network—can cause huge issues. They can degrade network performance, shut down key services, and even result in noncompliance with regulatory standards like SOX, PCI, HIPAA and FISMA. And they can compromise network security.

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:

Congratulations to the UCONN Huskies, the NCAA March Madness champs! It's always exciting when the underdog prevails. When the odds are stacked against you, as an IT pro, that is, you need to be prepared to manage through a bunch of problems that can make life difficult.

Historically, technology adoption has started in the workplace. Computing, unified communications, mobile devices, etc. all got the start in the corporate world and then made their way into the consumer space. In addition, when looking at age demographics, the early adopters of technology are typically twenty somethings.

IT teams work valiantly behind the scenes every day to make sure their digital businesses stay connected.

CompTIA A+ certification gives you a basic foundation in networking, software and PC hardware. Server+ certification helps you dig deeper into those concepts as they relate to the server. The latter credential tells shops you have what it takes to be a server technician, server support specialist, server administrator or storage administrator.

When transitioning to a new solution, do IT vendors elicit a mix of anticipation and fear? That makes sense. You're eager to see the new service hard at work, but simultaneously concerned it won't live up to promised hype or deliver on promises made by the supplier.

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.