Daily Network Monitor

By Peter Christensen

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”.

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By David Karp

Well, it’s not all as earth-shaking as that, but I’m getting tired of grabby headlines that loudly announce or predict the death of this or that.  Starting with disco, hardly anything is as dead as people like to say.  Cultural trends and technologies alike are much more prone to mutate and evolve or get reborn or remixed than to actually die. (Has anybody else noticed that the Apple Newton didn’t quite die, but got reborn first as the Palm Pilot and then the iPod Touch, and you can bet next week’s MacWorld will give birth to more…)

So you can understand my mixed feelings at Carolyn Duffy Marsan’s well-reasoned but poorly-headlined piece in Network World, The IT department is dead, author argues, which reviews Nicholas Carr’s book of the moment, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World from Edison to Google.  You may remember Carr for asking Does IT Matter? in his 2004 book of the same title.

IT isn’t dead, IT departments are not dead, and IT professionals are not dead.  Far from it.  In fact, I think they’re all feeling much better and might even get up and go for a walk.

Now, that said, this certainly doesn’t mean that IT departments are going to be able to sit around and do what they’ve always done for years and get away with it.  They will adapt or they will in fact die.  To borrow one of Carr’s analogies, just because few if any businesses today generate their own power on-site does’t mean that there’s no market for power or people skilled in generating it.  Those professionals just had to make some adjustments in their skills and career paths.

What Carr and many others – notably Google – are getting at is that lots of parts of IT are getting commodified (that means made into a commodity, not thrown in the commode), getting turned into utilities and getting outsourced or shared.  The role of a small or mid-sized business IT pro is going to evolve in two ways because of this:

1. In-house IT will have to get skilled at managing the IT utilites: they will have to select, monitor and integrate rather than provide these kinds of services themselves

2. In-house IT will become more and more concerned with applications and business results and less concerned with infrastructure and connectivity

I think you’ll agree that neither trend will do much to reduce the demand for in-house IT.  Web-based software sold on the ASP model hasn’t put IT managers out on the street, it’s just given them new and even more interesting and valuable responsibilities.  If that’s dead, then I’ve got a deathwish, for sure.

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By David Karp

Doubtless you’ve heard the phrase, “The cobbler’s children go barefoot” which means that sometimes professionals neglect their own families with regard to their profession.  As the marketing director with out of date business cards, I sympathize, but I think this is seldom true with networking professionals, or even IT types in general.  I bet half the readers of this blog have more bandwidth in their homes than at their office desks, and have probably wired up their in-laws and other relatives homes, too.

With CES firing up in Vegas this week, our thoughts turn from the cool tools at work to the cool toys at home.  Whatever Santa didn’t bring you can be seen – if not purchased – at CES.   On the home front, check out this news of home networking from CES – does your wired home do this?

In the HANA Home, consumers will be able to watch TV, time-shift their viewing, record live TV and push content from room to room within the home by using the HANA menus on any wired to wireless connected HDTV — all with guaranteed 400 Mbps guaranteed quality of service. The demo will illustrate how HANA uses whatever cabling they have in their home, be it coax, CAT5 or plastic optical fiber (POF), to interconnect their entertainment systems. Additionally, HD content will be transmitted wirelessly via a Wireless HDMI solution — with no loss of quality and full use of the HANA menus.The HANA Home at CES is sponsored by Samsung, Pulse-LINK, Oxford Semiconductor, Newnex, Firecomms and the 1394 Trade Association. These companies will showcase their home networking technology during the show.

That’s a lot of HD, with QoS, too no less!

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By David Karp

I spent some time in flow state yesterday at work.  That’s rare for me, unfortunately.  The life of a middle manager can be full of interruptions and meetings and crises, with precious few opportunities to buckle down and get some honest work done.  I’m sure you can relate, whatever your job might be.

For those who don’t know, flow state is “…the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing, characterized by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity.” [wikipedia]  It’s hard to explain, but when you’re in it, you don’t really feel the passage of time, you don’t get tired or bored, and you crank out lots of work, usually very good work.  Being able to get into flow at will is something to aspire to, something great artists and athletes can do.

What’s interesting about this – at least it’s interesting to me – is that I got into flow doing something that’s not usually part of my job.  I was setting up the next incarnation of The Daily Network Monitor Blog in WordPress.  I am by no means a codemonkey, but I was up to my elbows in PHP and CSS and RSS, and I was seriously into it and suddenly it was dark when I looked up from my computer.  I’m not going to pretend to have a hidden talent for programming, but I think I did pretty well.  You can judge for yourself when the new site goes live.

Until then, I hope you all step away from the reader and find a project that needs doing that you can dive into and achieve some flow.  Happy new year.

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By Peter Christensen

I was wandering around various job sites just to see what kinds of network management career opportunities are available. I was looking for job requirements where SLAs are defined as well as what level of experience was required. And while I did find a lot of opportunities where SLAs were defined, another interesting aspect became apparent, which I discuss below.

While the normal requirements for Cisco certifications, VoIP, QoS and routing, server monitoring experience were required, one thing that stood out was the need for experience with network monitoring tools. Of course the big-boys, HP, IBM and CA were mentioned but even more surprising to me was how many positions defined a requirement for experience with WhatsUp Gold.

While I am an Ipswitch employee, it was very interesting to see the number of positions that required WhatsUp experience as a requirement. Below is one job description that was particularly interesting (names have been deleted to protect the innocent):

Dynamic company is currently seeking Telecom VOIP Administrator. Candidate will assist in managing WAN connectivity to 50+ remote sites; participate in 24×7 on-call rotation; manage vendor relations; provide 2nd tier support to helpdesk staff; assist in managing existing Cisco IP Telephony solution and installing solution at new sites; document WAN and LAN, keeping documentation up-to-date.

Technical Experience:
Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Visio, Active Directory, Cisco Networking, EIGRP, BGP, Frame-relay, MPLS, Network Monitoring, WhatsUp Gold, SonicWALL Firewalls, Catalyst 45xx, Cisco IP Telephony, Cisco Call Manager 4.0, Cisco Unity voicemail

Requirements:
CCNA, College Degree (B.S. or B.A.), 3+ years Telecom experience, Cisco VoIP experience

This leads me to ask a question of network administrators/managers out there. Would a certification on WhatsUp Gold be relevant to building your career credentials?

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By David Karp

Today is the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year. It’s also the last Friday before Christmas and New Years, the last pay period of the year, and for me, the pivot point between budgeting and planning ahead for 2008, and starting the performance review process looking back on 2007.

In January we’re going to kick off a marketing campaign with our new white paper about the skills and methods of the most effective network administrators and tying it in to the idea of new years resolutions. I wonder though, if the average network tech or admin could take a minute to reflect on the highs and lows of the year, what would really be the networking new years resolutions for 2008?

I suppose the usual stuff would be there – lose weight, quit smoking, save more money for retirement, volunteer more, work out more, write the great American novel – after all network admins are people too, but what kind of things do techies resolve to do next year? Perhaps some of these:

* Get Cisco certified
* Spend less time in World of Warcraft
* Finally replace that [fill in the flaky old piece of hardware of your choice]
* Write that blog you’ve always wanted to write, an expose of the life of a corporate IT professional
* Pay for those shareware utilities you depend on every day
* Drink less Mountain Dew
* Reduce the portion of your cubicle devoted to action figures to no more than 50%
* Demand the budget to upgrade your network management tools to the latest versions

OK, I guess that might be a little self-serving, but I’ll leave it to you to chime in with your own in the comments. What are your top networking resolutions for 2008?

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