Tag:

Over the years IT pros have had to get used to less autonomy in terms of what touches their networks. Back in the day, IT loved RIM’s BlackBerrys because they were built for security. They never liked Apple iPhones. They were built for consumers, not IT security pros.

Let's cut right to the chase here, the life of an IT pro is hard. With endless to-do lists stuffed with infrastructure maintenance, security management and support, it's always a new adventure. Unfortunately for us, it doesn't look like things are getting any easier. Technological trends such as BYOD have made many aspects of modern business more efficient, but they've also increased the complexity of IT environments and made processes such as endpoint security management a real thorn in the side of many an IT pro.

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

Vegas in July is kind of like a giant data center without AC.

With the advent of BYOD, it seems like just yesterday that a new mobile movement was making waves through enterprise organizations across the globe. BYOD offers new opportunities for increased productivity, but it also raises a slew of difficult security questions. While many IT pros are still wading through the repercussions of this mobile onslaught, a fresh, new user revolution is creating similar buzz (and similar problems).

Your first exposure to any tool can be daunting to say the least. In the instance of WhatsUp Gold, we strive to make that initial process of implementing IT monitoring as simple and smooth as possible. With some guidance you can harness the flexibility of this powerful tool fairly quickly, because we know that you don’t have time to be dealing with large learning curves.

To the non-technical, network performance management may seem like the activities of a secret society.

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.

Picture this: Someone in your office decided to buy a new app. Maybe they told you about it ahead of time, maybe not. While you may rightfully assume this is a responsibility of an application development team, app monitoring often falls to sysadmins or network admins. Either way, if you develop an informal application footprint, you can save yourself headaches later. The seven tips below can get you started in developing a footprint for the application. They'll make you a smarter user of your network monitoring tool if the app ever strays into rogue territory.

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.

Having a large number of network monitoring tools that only provide a partial view of your end-to-end environment is like five people with in the dark trying to describe an elephant by touching only a single body part.

Have you ever received alerts from WhatsUp Gold in the middle of the night that a service has gone 'down', only to login and check to see everything is apparently good and happy? Then, just as you're about to logoff, WhatsUp Gold labels the device as 'up' again?

The importance of port management (and every other aspect of network infrastructure) has grown exponentially as our dependence on connectivity has increased. Additionally, with the advent of mainstream IoT technology, port management's role in both IT management and security becomes even more critical.

 Sometimes scripting takes the Ninja kind of patience.

How much time have you spent on Windows log management and analysis lately? Not much? No time for it? Allow me to help. Log management and analysis doesn’t take as much time as you think, and you can solve network problems and boost security and compliance while you're at it.

Last month we polled more than 1300 IT pros from around the world about their challenges with IT complexity. What we heard loud and clear is that there is far too much to get done, but not enough time to do it. Not to mention the time IT spends chasing down problems without full network visibility to find them fast enough.

Data archiving is an odd practice at times. When big data is focused on every last bit of information, the idea of relegating any amount of it to outdated media can seem like a waste of resources. Add the cloud and you begin to see how out of place this concept can be.

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.

If you do any security monitoring, it's easy to get overwhelmed by the amount of events you need to track. You can start by doing longer hours, but eventually you'll end up in a swamp — sucked in to the point that workflow comes to a standstill.

Michael Roth, senior systems engineer, at the University of North Georgia (UNG) is proud to tell his tale about how his team chose automation over IT complexity by changing a manual network inventory process across the school’s 5 campuses.