In our ongoing conversations with your peers, one message has resonated across the board: virtualization is here to stay, and it introduces unforeseen complications and problems into the packet capture and monitoring world.
The term “Virtual Blind Spot” has begun to fly around, but what does it mean?
Earlier this week, Network World Senior editor Denise Dubie published a very insightful article, “How far has virtualization come?”. In it, she reviews the results of three annual surveys conducted at Interop, all focused on virtualization technology deployments and adoption in the data center.
The survey, which was conducted by Network Instruments the past two years (NetQoS and NI conducted it together in 2008), revealed some very interesting data points.
Enjoy another guest post by Michael McQueen:
A network monitoring tool can be acquired online for free. While most system administrators feel that anything free is of no use, but that is absolutely not true. You can find many great tools online that are free that work every bit as good as the paid versions. When looking for a free version of the tool you need, you need to be careful and choose wisely.
This week, we offer you a basic Network Security reminder. This is especially good for businesses with no IT department or a lack of budget to purchase more expensive appliance-based solutions. Please enjoy this guest post by Michael McQueen as a complimentary service from Anue Systems.
A few days ago we announced the results of Monitoring Optimization 2010: Trends and Issues Surrounding Network and Security Monitoring from Enterprise Management Associates (EMA). We commissioned EMA for this study in mid-2009 because we found a significant shortage of available data regarding out-of-band / passive monitoring. Quite simply, we have been building out our product strategy with a particular approach in mind. This approach has been validated innumerable times by prospects and customers, but the smart strategist doesn’t build a product based strictly on anecdotal data or a myopic view of the world.
So we took matters into our own hands.
Continuing our end of year review of the various predictions from IT and networking thought leaders, today we turn our attention to IDC. For those of us who have been in high tech since the early 90s (or longer), IDC is a well-known entity. I remember working with them directly back in my days of fab planning and market research at Advanced Micro Devices, and they always offered a spin that made me take pause when interpreting trends and new developments.
This week we will enjoy a major holiday here in the USA, Thanksgiving. This tradition originated in the earliest days of our country’s existence, and we still take pause once each year to celebrate all of the good things that life has placed before us. While this is most certainly a time to enjoy family and be together, we want to take a brief moment to express gratitude as a company for the good things that have befallen us in the past year.
Monitoring Is Critical
As security and IT professionals, network and application monitoring has become increasingly important for a variety of reasons, including:
• New Data Security and Lawful Intercept compliance requirements that mandate full monitoring coverage, rather than sampling, the most common monitoring approach before these regulations emerged
• Service-Level Agreements that require a minimum level of performance and availability on important
services and applications
• New high-bandwidth applications such as IPTV and VoIP that must not only be monitored, but must also be delivered to the user with the packets in the correct sequence
• Increased dependence on electronics communications mediums and digital business transactions, requiring minimized downtime to support revenue and other financial goals
• Desire to shorten troubleshooting and disaster recovery activities without interrupting business processes or making customers aware that a problem happened in the first place
• Need to increase the network operations team’s productivity and to pre-empt upgrade and service needs before problems emerge
Clearly, these issues are relevant to both technical and business stakeholders, so monitoring has become a core requirement for network operations and security purposes.
Over the past several weeks, we have taken you through the three “pillars” upon which Monitoring Optimization is built: Network Visibility / Coverage, Tool Utilization, and Staff Productivity. We’ve also taken a deep dive into a hypothetical case study for Simson Confections. Let’s wrap it all up now and look at the total ROI for all three scenarios.
Simson has struggled for a couple of years to quantify the impact of lost productivity. Tradeoffs for staff priorities can lead to a gap in coverage, which is a secondary effect of stretching the network operations team too far. That said, for the purposes of this hypothetical example, we will assume they are not making tradeoffs between maintaining filters over time and troubleshooting, so we can isolate the productivity problem accurately.