Tag: Network Monitoring

When the new IT director for a major transportation company walked through the door on his first day, he knew in advance the big network monitoring headache he faced. He was joining a fast-growing company that supplies cargo containers used by ships, trains and trucks. To keep the containers moving, the 12-person IT team maintains a network of virtual and physical servers & desktops, spanning 12 locations, using more than 90 network devices, with about 150 active monitors and passive (SNMP trap) monitors.

Today, WhatsUp Gold introduces cloud monitoring and enhances storage monitoring capabilities. Service packs are meant to address issues or bugs, but this service pack is actually packed full of new features!

In this episode of Defrag This, monitoring expert, author, and founder of Aster Labs, Mike Julian discusses his upcoming book, Practical Monitoring, Effective Strategies in the Real World.

To get an idea of how massive a healthcare network infrastructure is, imagine you’re the manager for a healthcare network that has two corporate data centers, 1,300 servers (1,000 of which are virtual), 120 active directory domain controllers across the country, and three VM environments and their 600 more servers.

Selecting a network monitor solution should come down to value for most IT teams.

Panama is known for its sloths, but we can all agree no one likes slothy Internet and shoddy cable service.

Until a few years ago, most people thought of hackers as bright but maladjusted teenagers who mainly broke into networks for the fun of it. But now that hacking has gone big time, you're more likely to associate hacking with organized crime groups or "state actors."

The Delta Airlines power outage that grounded thousands of flights across the country was attributed to their legacy systems. What could they have done to prevent it? A network monitoring tool would have pinpointed the source of the problem possibly before the outage happened or even in just minutes instead of the reported 30 minutes. It would have allowed Delta's IT team to be nimbler while they remediated the issue.

In the early days of public education, and even in some rural areas today, multiple grades were taught in a single classroom. As challenging as that environment was for teachers, today's pedagogues find themselves in a similar situation, but now they're better equipped to handle it with the help of ed-tech tools. Teachers today may have classes full of kids with learning needs as diverse as the kids in the one-room schoolhouse, but with modern technology they can meet those needs and help children develop to their full potential.

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.

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.

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.

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?

 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.

As Isocrates once said, “It’s important to know where you’re going than to get there quickly.” If you’d like to integrate WhatsUpGold network reporting software with Google Maps, here’s how you get there. And it hopefully shouldn’t take you long to do it.