The Network Monitor

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.

The NCAA March Madness tournament is officially underway, and players and coaches aren’t the only ones who need to be ready.  With a majority of the initial games taking place during business hours, IT departments across every industry know that this means increased stress on the network and decreased employee productivity. Last year, March Madness Live delivered an unprecedented 64 million live video streams, which netted out to about 13.5 million hours of live video consumption.

The phrase “quick and dirty” is popular in the business world, but in some ways it’s really kind of a misnomer. Take for example an IT department that is stuck in the mud of network, applications and server performance problems. Things are certainly dirty, but they are definitely not quick.

Most people tend to associate the Dark Ages with horrible things like war, famine, disease and Monty Python but they probably don’t associate it with network performance and availability issues. Unless that person happens to be an IT administrator.

https://www.snapapp.com/ I had a lot of conversations with IT Directors, network administrators and other IT staff at FETC this past week in Orlando.  As we talked about their top priorities and challenges, there were three topics that kept coming up over and over again.

There is nothing like the excitement of Christmas morning, and if history is any indicator, on Thursday morning Wi-Fi is going to slow to a crawl all over the U.S. and beyond.

Yesterday we announced the results of our second annual “Happy Holidays?” survey where more than 200 IT pros shared compelling data on the impact that network issues have on their ability to enjoy the holidays. To the surprise of no one, IT pros are bearing the brunt of the burden in keeping organizations operational during the holiday season.

In July of this year, Enterprise Management Associates published a landscape review entitled EMA Enterprise Network Availability Monitoring Systems (ENAMS) Radar Report 2014.  A blog post written by my colleague Jim Frey on the EMA site reviews the scope and objectives of the report.  The study covered Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold version 16, along with sixteen other ENAMS from fifteen other vendors.

There are all kinds of potential IT emergencies out there that we should always be prepared for, network outages, system failures and data breaches come to mind as examples. However, there is another phenomenon that is starting to creep its way into enterprise networks: the zombie apocalypse. While it may sound like the plot of a B-level, made-for-cable Halloween movie, Network Zombies have quickly asserted themselves as the most troublesome nemesis to the modern-day IT administrator. They are dangerous and unpredictable, and without the right approach these zombies can cause downtime and lost productivity. However by adopting an approach that generates greater levels of network visibility, IT departments can effectively neutralize zombie problems once and for all.

Halloween may last one day, but network managers have to face IT nightmares that haunt them all year long. Nightmares like those caused by users exercising poor judgment. In some ways, they're not much different from the folks you see in horror films who always make the worst decision possible. Case in point is Geico's Halloween-themed commercial running on American TV this month. The piece depicts four friends running through fields, at night. They come upon a creepy farm house, and decide to hide behind... chainsaws.

Over the past few years, organizations have been forced to deal with the rapid rise of BYOD, which created a number of IT problems as more and more employees began bringing in their own devices to the workplace. Today, there is a new trend IT departments are preparing to deal with that could be more troublesome than its predecessor: Wear Your Own Device (WYOD). With the number of wearable devices steadily increasing, from Google Glass to Apple watches, it’s only a matter of time before we see a proliferation of wearables in the enterprise.

Most college students in the U.S. spent a good part of this month prepping and taking their fall midterm exams, and straining their campus networks as a result.

Today I'd like to share an excerpt and link to today's blog about network management posted by Jim Frey from Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) . It's a great lead-in to his firm's recent report on Enterprise Network Availability Monitoring Systems (ENAMS). From Jim's post:

As you've likely already heard on Sept 24th a new computer security threat called Shellshock was identified and entered into the National Vulnerability Database as CVE-2014-7169.