Will the Cisco Cius Make Desktop Video Conferencing Mainstream?

With the Cisco Cius product launch, the age of desktop video conferencing may well be emerging. The Cisco Cius is an ultra-portable, mobile collaboration business tablet that offers access to essential business applications and technologies.

The early adaptors are likely to find making video conferencing calls within an organization extremely easy and become hooked on the experience.

To read the full post, please visit the new location of our blog and start following us there. We recently revamped our website and have moved locations. We look forward to you visiting.

The iPad in Action

I wrote a post some time ago about the potential of the iPad to help manage networks. Since then, I’ve grown much more excited about its potential as a business tool.

The iPad is such a powerful tool for IT administrators because it is much more convenient than a netbook. It is lighter and thinner, can be used instantly and has a large display area – a powerful combination for remote networking.

I’ve been using the iPad myself with the new version of dopplerVUE 2.1 and its web client capabilities. The display is perfect for the powerful visualization features of dopplerVUE. I can clearly display and monitor network status and performance by combining maps, charts and gauges into a single dashboard. If you want to give it a try for yourself, download the 30 day free trial version.

The iPad is a great tool while you’re on the go. Some tasks are always going to be much easier to address with the computer on your desk. But in my mind there is definitely a place for the iPad in terms of network management. If you’re using the iPad for IT management, it would be great to hear about your experience.

A Network Management Resource...

I came across a network management website that I thought was worth sharing. See what you think.


Network Management Software is a source of news, analysis and reviews of the IT network management space. The website is solely focused on the network management space and offers great tips on the basics of network management and the fundamentals on application monitoring.

Also keep in mind that dopplerVUE recently added application centers for Exchange, IIS and SQL in its new 2.1 release and is available for download.

Network and Security Monitoring – What are the Key Challenges in 2010?

Want to wager a guess as to what the key issues are surrounding network and security monitoring in 2010? If you want to confirm or deny your suspicions, check out a study from Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) involving network and security operations professionals highlighting the challenges and best practices for optimizing monitoring in 2010. In case you don’t have time, here are some of the highlights:

1. 24% of participants reported they either lack the staff to keep up with monitoring tasks or the training within existing staff to keep up with administration or interpretation.

2. A trend spotted by 62% of participants was the movement of staff to more generalist roles reducing the availability of technical specialists (shrinking budgets have made this a real challenge). Does your experience support this trend?

3. 66% of participants indicated they lack enough monitoring tools or the budget to buy them.

4. 47% of respondents were not fully utilizing the monitoring tools they had in place.
It's clear that in 2010 workloads won’t be decreasing and that the trend of doing more with less will continue. Another finding is that IT staff need a tool that centralizes their monitoring into a single system that is simple to maintain and is easy to use.

If this rings true for you, I can provide some helpful guidance. My company offers dopplerVUE a powerful easy-to-use network management tool that can help you bring together security and performance management into a single system. dopplerVUE is a cost-effective ($10 per element) and proven solution (check out our tutorials). Or download the software and try if for yourself for free. We also offer great customer support to make sure you make the most out of your investment.

That’s my product pitch for the day. Enjoy the weekend!

Network Disaster Preparedness Tips

With the winter season approaching, big storms bringing everything from heavy rain and lightning to snow and wind will be a constant threat to network operations. When was the last time your local IT team reviewed disaster preparedness procedures? Now is a great time to start. If any form of a disaster hits, do you or your team know your capabilities and how to react? Here are some important questions that your IT team should be able to answer and use to improve your disaster procedures:

  

1. Are you aware of your power situation?
a. What happens when a power outage occurs?
b. What is the operational status of the UPS system?
c. How long will the UPS backup systems sustain key functions?
d. What do we do if the outage is longer?

2. What if the building becomes unavailable? (fire or water damage)
a. Are the offsite backups current?
b. If a network device or server is ruined, what is the procedure to replace it?
c. Does everyone know the primary and secondary facility contacts to use should an after-hours emergency occur?

3. What if access to the building is limited? (snow, tornado warnings, etc)
a. Is VPN access updated for all employees that may need to work from home?
b. Can all of the required maintenance procedures be done remotely or skipped for several days?

4. What if the phone and/or Internet connection is lost?

5. What is the customer impact when any of these conditions occur?

Advance planning is the best approach. A good network design can minimize the impact of storm and disaster related problems. Having redundant phone and data lines from different carriers minimizes the inbound/outbound traffic risk. Using an adequate number of UPS devices mitigates all but very lengthy power outages and network routing protocols like HSRP reduce the risk of single device point of failures.

Even monitoring your network with disaster prevention in mind can be helpful in avoiding unnecessary failures. These tips are a great starting point:

1. Enable redundant polling of critical devices
2. Map out HSRP primary and secondary links
3. Know the status of the UPS systems
4. Make sure you have 24x7 access to your management system client

 If you have tips for network disaster prepardeness, please share them with us.

Before Adding More Bandwidth…

Does your network reach capacity at similar times every day? If so, before you decide to add more bandwidth at additional cost, think about adjusting traffic patterns at no cost.

As a first step, consider using a network monitoring tool to baseline the most common time periods when your network is at capacity. With this critical information, you can take some pro-active steps to optimize your network traffic.

Move maintenance tasks such as back-ups, updates, source control synchronization and large file transfers to off peak periods to decrease the load on the network.

If you can’t alter the timeline for maintenance tasks, encourage users to schedule bandwidth intensive tasks (video teleconferencing and webcasts) that are not time sensitive to business operations to off peak periods. Most users want the best possible viewing experience and will appreciate being able to schedule online events to take advantage of improved network availability.

Of course, if you don’t have flexibility to adjust traffic patterns to optimize the network, it may be time to add more bandwidth.

Using SNMP for Network Troubleshooting

Here is a network troubleshooting tip to consider. Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is used for getting notifications and performance data about networking devices. It can also be useful in a non-traditional way as well.

When most networking devices are very busy they stop responding to management requests and focus on core routing or traffic-level tasks. As a result, if you see increasing SNMP response times or worse complete SNMP response failure, it’s likely a leading indicator that a device’s performance is nearing the user impact stage. The device may not be down yet but, it very well could be shortly. Use this indicator to your advantage and start monitoring SNMP response time and failure rates. Be sure to keep a close eye on these devices and you’ll know about problems before it's too late.

Why use SNMP v3?
Need stronger security than community strings and access lists can provide? Consider moving to SNMPv3 if you haven't done so already. SNMP v1 and v2 are sufficient for many networks. When management traffic must pass over the public Internet, however, SNMP v3 provides improved message security that can be important.

Enhanced security features in SNMPv3 include:

- Message integrity to ensure a packet has not been tampered with in transit.
- Authentication and verification that the message is from a valid source
- Encryption of packets to prevent snooping by an unauthorized source

Email Failure – Not Again…

A common complaint I hear and a pain I’ve experienced myself (too often) is email going down. Email is now the most common form of business communication and its use is only growing. According to Osterman Research, email traffic between 2008 and 2012 is projected to grow by 68%.

In any given 12-month time period, there is a 72% likelihood of an unplanned email outage and a 24% likelihood of a planned email outage in any given company according to a Dell survey.

One major cause of email downtime is network connectivity failures. Connectivity loss can be caused by anything from a hub, switch or router failure to a broken or damaged cable or fiber. Not to mention a whole host of other complicated issues.

To reduce the chance of an outage, consider proactively monitoring and managing your network to avoid a failure or respond as early as possible to a problem – saving you the headache of a bunch of complaints.

The network management software I recommend and work with everyday has the ability to generate alarms based on both network faults and network performance. This integration allows alarming on multiple issues to best anticipate and accurately pinpoint network problems and avoid system downtime. Below is a screenshot showing this functionality.