The Network Monitor

One of the biggest headaches for IT is dealing with intermittent network performance problems. These are the kinds of issues that boldly appear but soon vanish before the source can be pinpointed. Only to happen again and again, frustrating and random each time. In most cases, these network performance problems look like they could be rooted in a certain area when, in fact, they lie somewhere completely different.

Last Friday was Sysadmin Day (or, System Administrator Appreciation Day in full form), an annual day of recognition for hard working sysadmins. It was created by sysadmin Ted Kekatos in 2009 after being inspired by an HP ad promoting LaserJet 400 printers where a sysadmin was celebrated by colleagues. For context and the full story, check out this 2011 interview with Ted by Spicehead Nic Tolstoshev.

It's the last Friday in July which means it's the annual System Administrator Appreciation Day, also known as Sysadmin Day. It's kind of the Hallmark holiday of the IT world, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have any significance.

Love them, like them or loathe them, Microsoft applications and technologies are part of the IT landscape, and except for mobile, things aren't changing anytime soon. Managing the Microsoft cross-section of your organization's digital ecosystem is key to maintaining your sanity, if not improving your temperament.

With bandwidth demands on K-12 networks increasing and education budgets shrinking, school IT departments are hard pressed to deliver on the promise of education technology.

As I watched Star Trek Beyond in the theater, I couldn’t help but relate working on an IT team to working on the USS Enterprise. All that they endure in this latest installment is metaphorical to everything IT does for a business. It’s easy for IT teams to fall apart when team members lose themselves, due to selfishness or burnout. It’s equally important for IT to keep the ship (or USS Enterprise) in running order. The movie evens starts with Kirk feeling bored and disassociated with his current job after being in space for 995 days, something which IT pros can all relate. "The grind", as we like to call it.

I’ve been to many IT conferences over the years, some have been underwhelming, and some have been more than worth the trip. Cisco Live US 2016 last week in Las Vegas definitely falls into the latter category. And it’s certainly justified, grown men playing Pokémon Go aside. Our booth was “standing room only” from beginning to end and our conversations with our fellow IT brethren were very interesting and enlightening. Even Diglett stopped by to say hello.

I work in the IT business, so when something as monumental as Pokémon GO is taking over headlines for more than a week I usually ask a few questions. The first thing folks with an IT background ask themselves is how this phenomenon will affect the network bandwidth of a business. It’s an important question to ask, but the answer in this instance is, “Not at all.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.