Daily Network Monitor

I will be attending the Cisco Networkers show in Barcelona and will be blogging from over there next week. Should have some interesting insights and news to share from the show floor. If any of our loyal readers are attending, please stop by our booth (E44). Look forward to meeting our loyal readers and customers.

Who is more demanding, the IT employee or the IT manager? The general consensus is that the IT employees are.  A recent survey shows that 18 to 31 year old IT professionals are more demanding than previous generations and are disillusioned faster. Many millennials expect that they will immediately start at the top and receive higher starting base pay. As a result, many IT organizations are finding increased turnover as employees find out that they actually have to work their way up as previous generations did.

As baby-boomers retire and leave an expertise gap, the next generation can learn a lot from these “experts” not only in gaining IT experience, but also in how to understand and manage themselves and the work environment they find themselves in. My advice is find a mentor and soak everything up like a sponge. Eventually, you will be the older generation and be facing the same dilemma with the next generation of “millennials”.

As with any product or application it all comes down to usabilty. Usability is not driven by product management, marketing, QA or engineering, but by the customer. The truth of the matter is, if your product or application is not simple to use and has designed in usabilty, no matter what cool and complex new features or functionality there are, if they can’t accessed and used immediately, it doesn’t matter.

This model holds especially true in network monitoring. Current networks are complex enough, but if the tools you are trying to use to monitor them can’t be configured or are not self-configuable or worse you have to hire a specialist to install and configure them. Why take an already complex task and throw more time and money at it to resolve what should work right out the box?

A recent article on SearchNetworking.com highlights the need for tools that work and work immediately.

I’d be interested in hearing from networking professionals on their thoughts on this subject.