The Network Monitor

IT teams work valiantly behind the scenes every day to make sure their digital businesses stay connected.

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.

CES, the first big technology event of 2016, wrapped in Vegas last week and as expected, the Internet of Things (IoT) was a hot topic. If last year’s show was the one where everyone heard about the potential impact of disruptive technology, this year was certainly the year we saw the breadth and depth of the IoT. From the EHang personal minicopter to more fitness tracking devices than you could, erm well, shake a leg at, CES 2016 is abuzz with news of how technology is shrinking, rolling, flying and even becoming invisible.

It's been a year since Sony Pictures employees logged into their workstations, expecting to start a normal workday, when they were greeted by soundbites of gunfire, images of skeletons and threats scrolling across their monitors. To date, the Sony Pictures attack is arguably the most vivid example of advanced persistent threats used to disable a commercial victim. A corporate giant was reduced to posting paper memos, sending faxes and paying over 7,000 employees with paper checks.

Technology infrastructure has an expiration date. The problem? It's not stamped on the side of the carton. Or available online. The life cycle of any server, networking device or associated hardware is determined by a combination of local and market factors: What's the competition doing? How quickly is your business growing? Will C-suite executives approve any new spend?

Knowing which BYOD risks your fellow IT pros face is paramount in determining how to mitigate them. And the scope of BYOD's influence on company data hasn't stopped changing since your office first implemented a BYOD policy. What kinds of devices are users likely to bring to work with them? The range of devices encompasses more than just smartphones and tablets. Once these devices are identified, however, the risks they represent can help your team formulate a policy to keep resources safe when accessed from outside the network.

For the past few years, the tech industry has become fixated on kicking off the new year with a festival of connected devices at the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. The fact that this show has become so significant to the tech industry is another indication of the potential importance of the ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) and growing impact of the ‘consumerization of IT’ on the way IT is adopted and managed.

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.

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.

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.

Our WhatsUp Gold network monitoring tools are used by the U.S. Department of Defense and other U.S. Federal agencies.

The IPv6 protocol has consistently made it into top-10 and tech-prediction lists for years now but, as noted by Wired, IPv4 addresses are finally drying up.

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.

When you think of best practices in IT, what comes to mind first? Maintaining a very solid security posture? Sure, that’s a big one. But what about IT asset management? (Or IT inventory management, as the case may be.) If you don’t know what's attached to you network you're likely a lot less secure than you think.

we had the chance to interview some of the speakers prior to their sessions.

We were fortunate enough to survey the presenters at our upcoming virtual conference. We asked each of them several questions about their pain points as IT professionals.

We asked several questions about their pain points as IT professionals.

Today brings us a best practices story by Michael Roth, the senior systems engineer at University of North Georgia.

High on the list of network engineering nightmares is a business critical process failing because it didn’t receive adequate bandwidth. With applications, users and data competing for bandwidth, how do you assure your business-critical applications are getting the bandwidth they need for optimum performance? The best approach is a combination of network QoS (Quality of Service) policies and bandwidth utilization monitoring.

Summertime Blues Survey's findings reveal that IT pros felt the heat this summer as they worked to keep networks buzzing along for remote workers.