Daily Network Monitor

I attended Network World in Washington D.C. last week and sat on the Network Management track industry panel. During one of the main presentations, a straw poll was taken of the audience of about 130 networking professionals about how they find out about application or IP services failures. Over 60% of the audience raised their hands when asked if the end users informed them. The response was an eye opener to a lot of people.

The days of networks as a business driver are no longer the reality. Network managers are now driven by business requirements and must ensure that the network can provide support to how rapidly the business can react and adapt to new and varying economic drivers, markets, competitors, customers and regulatory initiatives.

The network needs to be the solid foundation and you should know your networks better than your end users. The business and your livelihood depend on it.

I recently joined Ipswitch in marketing after a hiatus from the enterprise networking space. I come back to find some significant changes and some things that seem to never change.

The things that have changed:

- more devices
- more bandwidth
- enterprise VoIP has arrived (finally)
- firewalls
- 802.11 wireless
- software licensing
- less documentation

Things that have not changed:

- stressed out Network Administrators
- understaffing (do more with less)
- more devices
- software bloat
- incompatible systems
- software licensing
- lack of documentation

Several things have occurred to me over the past few weeks and now even more than ever, is the expectation that the network is a utility and like heat and power and is just expected to work. So heavy is the reliance on network infrastructure, that most companies literally shut down when access to servers and the Internet has been compromised. Reactive management of networks is no longer acceptable and given that a network management professional’s job is at stake every time there is an issue, pro-active or predictive management of this critical asset is essential.

How many network administrators have internal SLAs that they are measured against for services up-time? I’d be interested in hearing from the folks in the trenches about their experiences and how they meet these expectations.

I’ll dig into some of the above changes and not changes over the next few weeks.