The Network Monitor

Your network is a living, breathing entity. Like a living body or an organic brain, it’s constantly moving things around and changing from moment to moment. Every single individual part is in continuous contact with and reacting to every other part. The job of your monitoring tool is to track all of this.

Many companies that never dreamed they’d be developing their own software are having to “roll their own.” Sometimes it’s an internal-use-only, as a custom layer over an existing platform like Salesforce, sometimes as a product they’re selling. This is what has driven the DevOps methodology over the past several years.

Monitoring bandwidth usage is a vital aspect of any network management strategy. Bandwidth monitors collect, monitor and analyze network traffic volume by end-point (user), port, interface and protocol (application). This information enables IT Admins to:

If you are a systems administrator or a security engineer, it is probable you have a requirement to filter and forward Windows event logs either directly or hierarchically. There are many alternatives available to accomplish this goal, one of which is Windows Event Forwarding (WEF).  In this article, you will learn to configure a simple source initiated WEF subscription which utilizes the HTTP protocol to forward events between a client and a collector in a single domain.

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.

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.

Company bandwidth usage has, for reasons other than expected growth, increased dramatically and continues to do so every year. Over time this usage is going to increase beyond your workforce's limitations, which poses an important challenge for IT teams.

As a former cubicle-based drone, I can readily identify with the bandwidth problems faced by users, with slowdowns and interruptions suffered for a variety of reasons, whether it is essential backups best run after-hours, problems with new security patches or updates, failing hardware or streaming video addicts.

One relatively simple and common tool that provides additional valuable analysis into security incidents is log management.

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

Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is a standard set of communication rules, that is, a protocol. This protocol governs the main way for querying and monitoring the hardware and software on a computer network.

A lot can change in a decade. In so many ways, we’re living in a completely different landscape than we were just ten years ago, and workplace technology is no exception. We’ve moved workloads to the cloud, introduced BYOD policies, and now rely on workplace wi-fi way for all corporate provisioned devices. All of this network activity puts enormous stress on enterprise networks, and IT teams need to be able to keep track of it to keep things humming. That’s where enterprise network bandwidth monitoring tools come into play.

In this episode of Defrag This, we  discuss the nuances of IT networks in dangerous industries.

Every device, OS and application in your IT environment generates a record of activities in the form of log files. These audit trails of activity provide valuable information when investigating security breaches and when submitting regulation compliance reports.

There are so many types of log data to monitor and manage, but what are the most important logs to track? These are the top four types of log data that every IT team should be holding on to just in case.

Log data can be a tremendous resource for protecting digital assets against cyber attacks. Trouble is, trying to make sense of all the logs generated by IT networks is like pointing a fire hose at someone dying of thirst. They’re desperate for a drink, but they simply can’t handle that much water all at once!

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.

From IT to marketing, cloud computing has revolutionized the way the world does business. We now a maintenance-free to get unlimited scalability and reliability, and we’re all going to live happily ever after, right?

If 2017 was the year of the ransomware attack, then 2018, insofar as it can be defined by malware, was the year of cryptojacking.

For most IT organizations, network monitoring is an essential tool. Network monitoring tools play an important role in letting IT pros get complete visibility into the status of network devices, systems, and applications, keeping the IT team aware of problems with services, networks, application performance, and more.