For sysadmins and other IT pros, Halloween plays itself out all year long with all sorts of network nightmares and stranger things that can turn any server room into a house of horrors. With a little preparation and the right tools, IT can avoid the kind of night terrors that play themselves out at the office during the day.
1. Zombies: Only Zombies should be slow, not your network. With more insight IT can move a lot faster than the walking dead and kill problems before they get noticed.
2. Dracula: End users streaming music or video can suck the bandwidth right out of your network. Track them down, put your stake in the ground and offer up a link to your IT policies to encourage them to listen to Lady Gaga's new album back at the crypt.
3. Frankenstein: Finding problems on your network is hard enough. Poring through a mess of disjointed pieces and parts only makes it harder. It's amazing what you can see once you get past the clutter.
4. Barbed Wire: Employees downloading the latest version of iOS or streaming a major event like the Olympics can wreak havoc on network performance. Be prepared to manage bandwidth so those spikes on your network don't snag you in the barbed wire.
6. Chucky (aka Knife-Wielding Dolls): With malware trying to creep its way into your network any way it can, one small mistake can mean big problems. Cybersecurity is not child's play. Keep your end users educated, aware and vigilant.
7. Jason Voorhees: It's hard to manage a network when your users pick and download their own applications that lurk in the shadows. Flip on the light switch and shed some light onto what's attached to your network.
8. The Mummy: Don't get wrapped up in the same problems. Finding the source of a performance problem should be a lot easier than finding King Tut's tomb.
9. Black Widow Spider: Free open source products can tempt you with big promises, but can ultimately tangle you up in a web of technologies that weren't meant to work together.
Related Article: Hitting the High Notes: Network Troubleshooting Time Cut by 80%
10. Skeleton: Bare bones budgets make it really hard to get the kinds of tools IT pros need to do their jobs. But it's not a lost cause if you can find a software licensing scheme that doesn't bleed you dry.
11. Graveyard: No one wants their epitaph to read "Rest in Panic". Try to stay one step ahead in the server room and one foot out of the grave.
12. Plucked Eyeball: There's no reason to get blinded by network alarm storms. Cut through the clutter and get some visibility back.
Related Article: 8 Server Monitoring Tactics to Deal with Alerts
13. Werewolf: Don't get bitten by the unexpected. Stay on top of those event logs because there's no silver bullet to stop a data breach.
With a little foresight and a few pieces of code working in your favor, hopefully the network nightmares that plague your server room will go away as fast as a Halloween candy sugar high.
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