Daily Network Monitor

By Erin Hayes

Who Do You Browse With?

I wrote a blog nearly a year ago expressing my mistrust in Google Chrome and asserting my position that when Chrome became available for Mac (my preferred computer) I would not be jumping on that bandwagon.

Well, what a difference nearly a year makes. I did stay somewhat true to my word and I was not the first, the second, or even the thousandth to jump on the Mac compatible Chrome bandwagon last spring. But jump, I eventually did.

The bugs I encountered a year ago; the incompatibility with Google’s own commodities such as YouTube and Gmail, had been worked out. The browser offered a variety of sleek new skins with which I could customize it and the load time for my favorite sites saw a noticeable, albeit not huge, improvement from Firefox.

And according to the numbers released by W3School’s Browser Statistics Month by Month last week, I wasn’t the only internet user to take notice of Chrome’s advancements: Chrome was used for 10.8% of visits to W3School site in January 2010. A solid 3^rd place after Mozilla Firefox (46.3%) and Microsoft Internet Explorer (36.2%). 

Out of curiosity I used Google Analytics to get an idea of how the browser war was playing out with the visitors of WhatsUp Gold’s external blog www.dailynetworkmonitor.com.

Sure enough, there was a marked upswing in visitors using Chrome to come to our blog in January as well. Our stats for January were about the same as W3School’s showing. Chrome rang in at 10% whereas Firefox held 33% of the use and Internet Explorer 51%.

But what was more interesting to me – and more impressive proof of this market trend – was the jump in Chrome use between November and December. In November Chrome barely showed up in our analytics. It was used for .03% of the visits, just coming in under Safari’s .035% share. Firefox counted for 22% while Internet Explorer dominated at an impressive 69%.

But December brought a noticeable shift; Chrome suddenly jumped to 7% of the use while Safari stayed around the same. Firefox stayed around the same overall percentage where Internet Explorer saw a drop off to 54%.

It’s my opinion that Chrome’s market increase is largely due to frustration with Internet Explorer. Security issues aren’t anything new with the browser, but renewed concern over it’s security led the French and German governments to advise people to switch browsers last month.

While IE still dominates the browser space, its market share has seen a steady decline; from 68.5% last March to 62.12% in January. Firefox hasn’t seen too much change in their market share over the last year; Mozilla’s browser suffered a one percent drop from their 23.30% in March mid year but caught back up to 24.43% last month. Chrome, however, held 1.62% in March 2009 and can now claim 5.22%. Google’s browser owes most of its jump to OS X users who did not have access to it until last spring.

I’d like to see Google Chrome’s market share continue to grow and challenge Microsoft to create a more user and security friendly Internet Explorer. While in corporate terms the Internet giant and computing czar are on a level playing field, Google’s Internet browser has a ways to go to catch up to Microsoft’s institution.

Google’s scrappy little browser could be the motivation Microsoft needs to create a level browser one should be able to expect from a company with resources like Microsoft.

It’s my opinion that the best thing to happen to any big company is a little competition. It keeps them from getting away with laziness and keeps prices and expectations in the market fair.

But then again . . . my opinion on the matter may be a little biased.

Popularity: 40% [?]

By Mike Manfredi

I know that as a network manager, having free time is a rare occurrence so it is essential that you stay ahead of the game when it comes to managing and monitoring your IT infrastructure. A big part of this is knowing exactly where and when issues occur in the network the minute they happen. This means making sure that you receive alerts about network failures before anybody else. It is important to take a proactive or predictive approach to monitoring and managing your company’s network. Knowing about potential problems before they actually have a negative impact ensures optimal up time and performance.

So organizing your alert information is a vital part of effectively managing your network. However, as networks continuously change and grow, this can tend to be a pretty time consuming and difficult process. Well, with the new Alert Center available in WhatsUp Gold v14, you gain the ability to consolidate all of your alert information and notification policies in one workspace. This not only makes your life as a network administrator easier, but it also ensures that you are always on top of your network.

With the Alert Center, you are able to define and implement system wide notification policies based on the criticality of a device or system. Alert acknowledgement allows you to respond to alerts and provide status and acknowledgement, showing other administrators that a problem is being worked on or resolved. Automatic Resolution is an innovative new feature that actually enables the product to reset monitors if a threshold falls back within parameters by the next polling.

Find out more about the new Alert Center from one of our very own WhatsUp Gold experts, Nathan Smith.

Popularity: 50% [?]

By Mike Randolph

A Gem of an Application in WhatsUp Gold

Have you ever wanted an easy way to view multiple WhatsUp Gold reports or other application data at a glance? The Dashboard Screen Manager is a great solution to do just that. It’s a stand-alone utilitarian application that’s included with WhatsUp Gold Premium, Distributed, and MSP editions. It’s designed to display a series of Web pages, or a “playlist,” on one or multiple monitors. The Dashboard was developed as a complement to WhatsUp Gold, and as a tool to help keep your network status highly visible. 

The Dashboard runs on a single or multiple display panels and cycles through report pages on the WhatsUp Gold web interface. This capability provides network administrators with important network information on display at all times, cycling and changing report pages without the need of constant configuration or manual navigation. It also provides the capability to view multiple networks that you’re monitoring simultaneously.

Though the Dashboard Screen Manager was developed to work along-side WhatsUp Gold, it can display any web page. For example, a network admin for an Internet business providing service to a small town in the desert glances at a screen on the Dashboard and sees that the connectivity to the town is down. With a display showing the weather for this town on another screen, the network administrator quickly sees that the extreme temperatures of the day have likely caused problems for the cable transmitters. Now she can take swift action to resolve the problem.

The Dashboard Screen Manager is simple to install and configure. Just run the install program, located in the default folder C:\Program Files\Ipswitch\WhatsUp\Dashboard_Setup.exe. Now configure the web pages you want to display and you’re set with better visibility to web pages and reports that are critical to maintaining network performance. For more information about configuring the Dashboard Screen Manager, see the WhatsUp Gold Help.

-This post was written by Mike Randolph, part of our amazing Research and Development team down in the Atlanta office-

Popularity: 21% [?]

By Mike Manfredi

The Basics of WMI and Why You Need to Monitor It

WMI is short for Windows Management Instrumentation. The technical definition for WMI is the infrastructure for management data and operations on windows-based operating systems. It is based upon the Desktop Management Task Force (DTMF) standard and is a specific set of extensions to the Windows Driver Model that provides an operating system interface through which instrumented components provide information and notification….

I know, that seems like a whole bunch of technical jargon that still sort of leaves you wondering, what the heck is WMI and why is it important?

Basically, the purpose of WMI is to define a  non-proprietary set of environment-independent specifications which allow management information to be shared between management applications. It prescribes enterprise management standards and related technologies to work with existing management standards such as DMI and SNMP, and compliments them by providing a uniform model. Based on the Common Information Model (CIM), which is an open standard that defines how managed elements of an IT environment are represented, WMI includes most of the Microsoft applications available today such as SQL Server, Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer, and others.

So why is the ability to monitor WMI enabled applications and devices? Well due to a constant increasing exposure of management data through WMI in windows, more and more IT administrators and managers started to develop scripts and automation procedures based on WMI. This has since lead most management software companies in the world to become WMI-enabled and capable of consuming and providing WMI information through various user interfaces.

WhatsUp Gold was one of the first network and application management solutions to fully support WMI and offer complete monitoring capability for WMI enabled desktop and server OSs and applications. Using WhatsUp Gold WMI monitoring capabilities, network managers can immediately understand the health of their servers and applications to pro-actively understand and resolve issues before they become real problems.

Popularity: 1% [?]

By Mike Manfredi

Never Navigate Your Network Without an Accurate Map

So an important aspect of monitoring your IT infrastructure is having an accurate map of the network telling you where each device within the network is located, allowing you to make any changes, updates or repairs on devices faster and easier. It used to be that network managers had to manually map out their networks, which was obviously a long, tedious process. Be thankful that today there is software available to you today that automatically discovers and maps your network, saving you the hassle of having to walk around your office drawing a map of your IT infrastructure by hand. I mean, you didn’t go to school to study art,  did you?

One of the plug-ins that we offer with WhatsUp Gold, called WhatsConnected, is designed to make your life as a network administrator that much easier by automatically discovering and mapping your network. It uses powerful discovery tools to locate every device on the network and to visualize device connectivity down to the individual port. On top of that, you will be able to determine critical device interdependencies.

Obviously, as technology has advanced at such a rapid pace, creating and enhancing IT networks has become a much simpler task. However, the downside of that is that, with that advancement, it has gotten more and more difficult toaccurately map these networks out. This can certainly create problems for network administrators and managers because if you can’t understand how devices in your network are connected, their interdependencies and their location, then locating and resolving problems in a timely manner is simply impossible to do.

With an accurate map that visualizes your network in a true-to-life way, that visualizes device connectivity and interdependencies, and that shows you the real-time status of all devices within your network, your job becomes much less stressful. I’m sure the thought of seriously decreasing the amount of reactionary e-mails to devices not working from employees and getting less flack from your boss for sub par performance from the network is a pleasant one. And really, you wouldn’t embark on a long road trip without a proper map of your route, so why risk monitoring and managing your companies network without an accurate topology in place?

Here is a quick video highlighting the benefits and features of WhatsConnected.

Popularity: 1% [?]

By Mike Manfredi

The Details on NetFlow and Why it’s Important

Effectively monitoring and managing your network can be complicated, and there is generally more than a few aspects of the network that need to have an eye kept on them. One thing that is becoming increasingly important in proper network monitoring is monitoring your network’s NetFlow. Of course, it is important to really understand what NetFlow is and exactly why it is so important to monitor this within your network.

Ok so, first things first, what is NetFlow exactly? Well, in technical terms, NetFlow is a Cisco developed technology that provides statistical information on traffic passing through NetFlow enabled devices like top hosts, protocols, applications and conversations.

Basically, NetFlow gives you in-depth insight into how your network is performing. (Yes, this means that during March Madness, your company’s network managers were well aware of  everyone who was streaming live games during the opening two days of the tournament.) It allows network managers to collect comprehensive information about their network’s performance and how the bandwidth is being used, making it easy to identify, view and report on the details of its utilization. By implementing a NetFlow monitoring tool into your network management strategy, you gain the ability to expand upon your efforts and begin monitoring your network’s performance, network planning, performing security analysis, analyzing traffic and bandwidth utilization, monitoring users and a number of other things.

Obviously, being equipped with the knowledge of the technology is a good way to approach monitoring the many aspects of your network effectively, however you also need to employ the efforts of the proper tools. WhatsUp Gold offers an easy to integrate plug-in called the WhatsUp Gold NetFlow Monitor, which offers you all of the features necessary to properly monitor your network’s performance and bandwidth utilization. Here is a quick tutorial about WhatsUp Gold’s powerful NetFlow Monitor tool.

Popularity: 3% [?]