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.

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.

This item via the MSP Mentor blog points out yet another way for smart VARs to get out of commodity selling and deliver sustainable service revenues by specializing.

Heyer’s new Advanced Remote Management Services (ARMS) provides customers with proactive remote monitoring and maintenance of Heyer [ventilation, anesthesia and inhalation] equipment — while complying with network security and regulatory practices … Heyer ARMS leverages the ComBrio Virtual Service Infrastructure (VSI), a virtual, secure IP infrastructure used for the continuous transport of real-time remote device monitoring data and on-demand access for remote device management.

Talk about a life-or-death SLA.  I’d be a little worried leaving my ventilation up to the average VAR, but I’m pretty sure that the ones who figure out how to do this well will be very well off indeed.  I’d even go so far as to predict some kind of IP revolution with all kinds of equipment getting network attached and coming under remote network monitoring.  What a wonderful world that would be.