The Network Monitor

Today’s tale from the front lines of network monitoring comes to us from Edgar, a systems administrator at a bank in Northern Europe. Edgar has been at the bank long enough to know the systems inside and out, but his expertise was challenged each time the bank acquired a smaller bank or merged with a rival. The new banks had different systems and plenty of custom applications.    

Servers, networks and applications aren’t the only remote devices that some companies need to manage. Did you know WhatsUp Gold can also monitor point-of-sale devices such as vending machines, in-store video games and ticket turnstiles? In fact, any device that supports ping, SNMP or WMI management protocols.

the company that started with one horse and a cart, and grew because they knew how to look ahead, picked WhatsUp Gold.

The IT life was simpler when employees each had one desktop computer and one landline phone. Technology did not move. It was stationary. Nowadays we have laptops, smart phones, and tablets that are both mobile and connected. And they have no wires. You are told that applications are mission critical,  expected to be accessible by people at a speed that optimizes productivity, and available to people inside and outside the organization. And who else wants access all the time? Hackers and other online criminals. As if you had enough to worry about.

Network Monitoring tools are a must-have for organizations of all sizes. When evaluating solutions focus is often placed on comparing features and ease of use, but understanding the total cost of ownership is very important. The core licensing structure, whether it is device-based, port- or interface-based, or measurement-based, can have a big impact on license costs up front and the administrative workload for maintaining the solution in production over the lifetime of the product.

Now you can isolate issues and resolve network and application problems before users are even aware anything is wrong. The new, easy to-use WhatsUp Application Performance Monitor, lets you diagnose and fix complex application performance problems quickly from within a unified dashboard.

When you evaluate application performance monitoring solutions, comparing capabilities is one key part of the assessment. But it can be misleading. Many application performance monitoring solutions include features that, while interesting, are not critical to you. Sometimes the feature-rich solutions are more costly, complex, and difficult to implement than you want. But sometimes more affordable products include features that aren’t high priority to you. The cost isn’t itself the determinant of whether products have more features than you need; it’s more a question of how closely each solution fits your purpose.

We are pleased to announce that WhatsUp Gold won Silver in the 2013 Redmond Reader’s Choice Awards Best of the Best for General Network Monitoring Tool.

If you're over budget this year, your BYOD policy may be to blame.

The past two weeks have been a whirlwind for the Network Management division as we launched v16. We finally have a chance to look back on all we’ve accomplished – including a fantastic PC Magazine review.

Last week Ipswitch’s IT team initiated moving its product download server to a Cloud offering with more bandwidth for growing capacity. However, before committing to this major change, IT decided to globally test the downloads of both servers, in order to determine whether or not the new Cloud platform could indeed offer Ipswitch greater resiliency and  download speed – in addition to higher bandwidth to support an increase in expected download traffic. Establishing a performance baseline was IT’s first task, and was simplified with AlertFox’s ability to create 15-minute test sensors from US, Asia, and Europe. Using AlertFox, IT was able to proactively identify the minimum, average, and maximum response time with timely emails and reports.

There is a common misconception that BYOD will be the savior of IT budget troubles; however, it’s not always as cost-effective as it seems. According to Aberdeen, enterprises spend an extra $170,000 per year to deploy 1,000 mobile devices via BYOD. A typical BYOD model costs 33% more than the traditional corporate-wireless model.

When I talk about BYOD with other IT pros, I get flashbacks of 2009 when the ‘cloud’ first became a hot topic. Security and costs are the top concerns, but few people understand the importance of monitoring and measuring the impact on the network, and why it matters.

My – how research has changed in the 20 years I have been working in IT and high-tech! Normally, you would have to scour reams and reams of articles in trade rags delivered via snail mail to find information relevant to your work. Now we have the ability to set alerts, custom feeds and create targeted searches to find many more ‘diamonds in the rough’ than was even possible 10 years ago.

Hey folks, this is Brian M. Jacobs, Senior Product Manager for the WhatsUp Gold family of network management products.  I would like to let you know that a security researcher (who has been a big fan of WhatsUp Gold for many years) has informed us of a SQL injection vulnerability in the WhatsUp Gold v15.0.2 product.  This vulnerability involves WhatsUp Gold running in a default deployment, in which administrators have privileged access to the database instance.  For customers who wish to restrict access to their database, we already provide the capability to configure WhatsUp Gold to run with reduced database privileges.  Details on how to implement reduced privilege operation can be found in our Database Migration and Management Guide.  Based on our customers' input, we are also working on security patches to limit all SQL injection related vulnerabilities, regardless of database privilege level.

Did you know that this year the number of Wi-Fi connected devices will exceed the world’s population? With the growing number of Wi-Fi connected devices, there have been more and more public Wi-Fi networks created. Nowadays, whether you are in a coffee shop or train station, there is probably a public Wi-Fi in your general area.

As a product manager of an integrated solution suite, it’s interesting to compare and contrast the similarities and differences between traditional systems management (OS deployment, inventory, software delivery, patching, monitoring) and its major trends (security, virtualization, cloud, efficient data centers) with network management (deployment and configuration, backup/restore, monitoring, traffic analysis, Quality of Service) and networking trends (mobile devices, cloud, virtualization, larger networking demands). There are many similarities between these two IT focus areas and I will “blog” about several aspects as I tie-in and compare systems management with network management over the next year. One similarity that is particularly easy to spot and “leaps off the page” for me relates to discovery. In fact, it ALL starts with discovery.

In my current role I speak to a lot of network engineers trying to automatically map their network topology. Actually it’s more than that, they don’t just want to discover devices, the want a port level diagram of exactly how all their switches, routers, servers, workstations, phones, firewalls . . . you get the point. Some engineers I speak to practically ask:

Maintaining a work-life balance is extremely difficult for some – especially network managers who are on-call 24/7. A great article titled Mobile Network Management Smartphone Apps for On-the-Go Engineers on SearchNetworking.com got us thinking about all the ways network management software for smartphones and tablets helps make network managers’ lives easier and achieve that work-life balance we all try so hard to maintain.

I'm sure many of you opened your browser to Google this morning to see the capitol of Kansas replace the search giant's name.