The Daily Network Monitor

Browsing around, I found this piece in India New England (yes, that’s the name of the publication) called Network downtime can be big expense for business.  Tim Hebert is definitely singing our song.  To wit:

Unplanned downtime is what keeps IT professionals, executives and business owners awake at night. Natural disasters and utility failures only account for three percent of all outages. Hardware failures account for less than 10 percent of all network failures. Systems errors account for less than eight percent of failures; application errors, 19 percent.

Industry experts estimate that almost 60 percent of network failures are caused by human error. This problem can be attacked through better training for IT organizations and end-users, better network documentation, better change-management controls and processes and better network monitoring and management.

Sixty percent of network failures caused by human error?  Wow.  There’s no citation to back that up, but it has the ring of truth.  After all, if downtime came from more controllable sources, there wouldn’t be so much of it, right?

In any case, Tim’s piece makes clear the case for effective network management and network monitoring.  I hope IT managers take heed and make a small investment in protection against what could be a huge loss.

I’m proud to report that the geeks here at The Daily Network Monitor did not tune in to the liveblogging or the live video of Steve Jobs’ MacWorld keynote today. We were out eating sushi. But to ignore Apple makes no more sense than to ignore open source, to ignore Windows, or to ignore Cisco. I’ll leave it to the Apple fanboys to slobber over the latest iPhone enhancements, the new 8-core Mac pro and the frighteningly thin MacBook Air. I want to talk about the Time Capsule.

This is classic Apple. They didn’t invent the category or particularly innovate the technology, but they put together a set of existing technologies in a beautiful package that’s beautifully integrated with their other offerings. The Time Capsule is a wifi base station (seen those before) that allows USB print sharing (been there done that) and boasts up to a terabyte of network storage (yawn). So what makes this more appealing than, for example, Iomega’s StorCenter? How about out of the box integration with Apple’s Time Machine, a Vista-busting backup feature of the latest cat-themed Mac OS X? (Also, the StorCenter costs a little more, has one more USB port and RAID, and is very, very ugly.)

Sure, home network storage and backup are child’s play (sometimes literally) to the average networking pro. But ask yourself, network dudes, why can’t it be this elegant and easy at work, too?

It’s good to stretch the ol’ brain once in a while. To that end, I popped in to MIT’s winter term to check out a workshop called “Coolhunting and Coolfarming through Swarm Creativity.” I don’t pretend to understand all of what was discussed, but I was struck by the analogies between the social network mapping shown, and the data network mapping performed by tools like WhatsUp Gold.

Prof. Peter Gloor showed off a tool that takes input from email records or online communities to create maps of social or business interactions, and Chandrika Samarth showed a real-life case study of how such mapping can lead to real process improvements in a real workplace, in this case a hospital. Characteristics like “betweenness,” “connectedness” and “sharing” are important attributes of social network nodes, also known as people. The charts show the communication between people as lines of length and thickness corresponding to the frequency and intensity of the interaction. Interesting data visualization, indeed.