The Network Monitor

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.

Understanding exactly what’s happening on your network in real-time through network visualization and analysis can give you the insight to shrink big problems into little, manageable ones.

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.

In my opinion, geolocation or location-based data (call it what you will) is the most frustrating aspect of mobile device usage. Although I was unable to obtain prompt expert insights to aid story credibility, surely I can't be the only one that thinks in this manner?

The idea for server virtualization technology was originally conceived as a means to reduce costs through software consolidation. Looking back it seems like a pretty obvious solution, but at the time this was revelatory. Instead of running each individual workload on a separate physical server, unused hardware capacity was now able to be used to run a number of workloads at the same time as virtual machines.

Today’s IT teams are under a heck of a lot of pressure to support multiple directives. They need to deliver IT infrastructure performance that can support defined business goals, strategies and operations. And very important to their success is complying with their commitments to a defined SLA (Service Level Agreement) with their business owners.

The World Wide Web’s 30^th birthday came and went this week, and though there was much to celebrate—just look how far we’ve gone since the days of America Online CDs and Yahoo! chat rooms— it also seems like the problems the Internet causes are beginning to outweigh the problems it solves.

For the first episode of the Have You Met? podcast series, Chris Payne from Advanced Cyber Solutions joined us on the phone. We got to chat with Chris about what exactly Advanced Cyber Solutions does as a company and how they are helping support and sell Ipswitch's solutions.

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.    

More complexity, fewer results. This is the general consensus among IT teams everywhere. IT infrastructures have evolved into a Frankenstein of servers, access points, applications, and mobile devices. To throw another wrench in there (pun intended), the tools we implement to control complex business networks end up increasing complexity due to the lack of integration between all of these tools. What you get is a tangled mess of solutions that only complicate matters.

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.

GeoEngineers is a small business with enterprise demands and a lot of pressure on its network. As an engineering firm with 400 employees located in 12 offices, managing the network presents many unique challenges. For example, its earth science engineers must be able to back up project files and submit data from the field at any time of day and from any location.

One of the more disheartening aspects of log collection within the Windows Operating system are the limited number of out of the box events related to security. It is often desirable to capture any unknown or malicious running processes, capture the source process for outbound connections, identify modifications to files and the registry, and to capture command and PowerShell commands that are run on a particular endpoint.  Luckily for systems administrators, Microsoft provides a great tool for this type of log capture within the SysInternals suite called system monitor, or Sysmon.

Today, WhatsUp Gold introduces cloud monitoring and enhances storage monitoring capabilities. Service packs are meant to address issues or bugs, but this service pack is actually packed full of new features!

https://www.snapapp.com/ I had a lot of conversations with IT Directors, network administrators and other IT staff at FETC this past week in Orlando.  As we talked about their top priorities and challenges, there were three topics that kept coming up over and over again.

Today we are glad to announce the availability of WhatsUp Gold version 16.2, a new upgrade to our flagship product that provides network, server and application monitoring. It helps make our customers’ jobs a lot easier to do while they work hard to manage and tame networks at companies and government organizations around the world.