The Network Monitor

Fashion designers and pop-culture mavens live by trendspotting; they pick up on what people are talking about, and distill it into styles and stories they care about.

Due to unplanned service interruptions, all IT teams must spend some time fixing problems and preparing for future issues. It’s inevitable.

Human error is responsible for more than half of all security breaches as of last year, making employees the biggest cyber threat of all. Shadow IT, on the other hand, is the deliberate installation of software that is not authorized by IT. The reasons for it? They vary, but generally include tools to make your tickets easier — which should already be available in a centralized company repository.

"The story of the blind men and an elephant originated in the Indian subcontinent from where it has widely diffused. It is a story of a group of blind men (or men in the dark) who touch an elephant to learn what it is like. Each one feels a different part, but only one part, such as the side or the tusk. They then compare notes and learn that they are in complete disagreement." (Source: Wikipedia)

The Basics of WMI and Why You Need to Monitor It

After several years of steady cloud adoption in the enterprise, an interesting trend has emerged. More companies are retaining their existing, on-premise IT infrastructures while also embracing the latest cloud technologies. In fact, IDC predicts markets for such hybrid cloud environments will grow from $25 billion in 2014 to a whopping $84 billion by 2019.

When you evaluate application performance monitoring solutions, comparing capabilities is one key part of the assessment. But it can be misleading. Many application performance monitoring solutions include features that, while interesting, are not critical to you. Sometimes the feature-rich solutions are more costly, complex, and difficult to implement than you want. But sometimes more affordable products include features that aren’t high priority to you. The cost isn’t itself the determinant of whether products have more features than you need; it’s more a question of how closely each solution fits your purpose.

Auditing network inventory can be time-consuming and tedious. It’s only amplified for organizations with an IT environment that spans across multiple locations. Making matters worse, manual inventories lead to outdated information and issues with compliance audits. But don't just take our word for it.

Imagine fielding a barrage of support calls from upset college students. Up in arms as they can't access a wireless network. Not long ago, that was the reality for a large university. The help desk was overwhelmed as they tried to manage a network of 2,500 access points. On top of BYOD chaos and students' big appetites for downloads. 

The final months of the year are often a time for housecleaning in IT which includes tasks like taking network inventory, confirming installed software is properly licensed, and prepping for compliance audits. Fortunately, these tasks are something a network monitoring solution can easily handle by gathering data and creating reports. Even better, you don't necessarily have to pay to get these tasks done.

Everyone and everything in our modern connected world uses bandwidth. The pipes are now far bigger than the old 56kbps dial-up speeds most of the world endured once upon a time, so bandwidth is usually not seen as an issue by the vast majority of network users. Well, not until there’s a problem, that is.

IT pros know all too well the old "have you tried turning it off and on?" trick - but there are some help desk stories that are stranger than fiction.

Windows event logs are a tool that every cybersecurity and IT professional should have in his or her arsenal. They can be used locally for troubleshooting or centralized for network awareness. When utilized centrally, powerful software known as a Security Information Event Management (SIEM) can be utilized to parse and search log files. But what if you are working locally?  Is there an efficient method to do the same? You will find the answer to these questions lies in Microsoft’s most powerful tool belt, Microsoft PowerShell.

In July this year, a computer fault forced United Airlines to ground its flights in the US for the second time in a matter of weeks. The problem, it turned out, was a ‘network connectivity’ issue caused by a computer router malfunction.

Scanning ports is very popular among cybercriminals. It’s often their first step of reconnaissance to discover services they can exploit and systems they can break into as they try to steal or destroy sensitive data. Two recent examples of major breaches illustrate just how handy port scanning is to threat actors:

If you’re a Network Administrator in a small to medium-sized business, chances are you’ve heard about our monitoring solution, WhatsUp Gold. You may even have fond memories of using it years ago. If you've never heard of WhatsUp Gold, then even more reason to check out the newest version, WhatsUp Gold 2018, which is packed with new features and capabilities.

In this new Defrag This - Have You Met? offshoot series, Ipswitch EMEA Sales Director, Sebastien Roques announces the Ipswitch EMEA Partner Awards for 2018.

Spotify recommends the next album you should play. Twitter customizes moments and stories you should be reading. The flash sale site Gilt personalizes online shopping down to your favorite brands and discounts. The best experiences on the Web and mobile apps involve clean design, interesting details and intuitive interactions. When companies strive to offer this experience in their apps, they often turn to the LAMP stack for enablement.

It can be tempting to build your own DIY Network Monitoring solution, but what's the real cost of building and maintaining such a tool at scale?

In the early years of IT, data was stored on paper tapes