jim.couch

In the morning war room at our organization the blame starts with "Why is the network slow?" not the website. The true answer is that it can be many places and I agree with the article that companies need a good end to end tool approach to help determine if the problem is the client, the network, the web front end of a…

I believe in standardizing everything (well, pretty much). People dont realize how important even something as simple as naming is concerned. Just from a monitoring standpoint it is much easier to create reports and alerts with standard names. Now we can use CPs and sure that is great but there will always be a case for a…

TY for bolding that!! I was actually coming here to ask that question.. Yes.. I dont read. LOL... BTW.. FWIW... I like social media and this particular mission. Fun so far.

I am not a fan of cloud. I know that makes me sound old and outdated but I just dont trust my bits in someone elses cloud. 

What would be the appropriate thing to do so that we dont miss questions that are broken? For example, this one having two correct answers but radio buttons. maria.bungau? Thanks

Been following this discussion. Again, not a VoiP guy so my participation (currently) is simply letting Cisco do the work for me and getting things in their correct voice vlan. 

As of today, its a beautiful sunny day with not a CLOUD in the sky. But the weather changes quickly here and I am sure we'll see them rolling in. I wouldnt mind a few unimportant clouds but around these parts.... clouds bring storms and damage and they scare me. You cant see into a cloud very well.. and I dont like that…

Our NCM implementation isnt that old yet and so its kind of got a "just out of the box" kind of feel to it. I do have it downloading the configurations of most of our routers and switches in case we need to go back to a configuration to configure a new device. We also have created some compliance scripts to run and verify…

We log to a central server but that is mostly owned by our security team. We use NCM for configuration safe keeping and other things. We have a smattering of tools but honestly we still get suprised now and then.

I think there will always be the abuse of information. Unfortunately we want and greed over power, and sometimes we also just want that information for our own entertainment. I guess I am skeptical. Watching the watchers is a great plan.. but necessary evils all around.

I'm in the middle of a "redesign" of my alerts and if "imitation is the highest form of flattery" then I hope you soon find yourself flattered. I'm going to borrow some of this. deverts, do you have a standard alert email (or whatever) that is sent out using variables and such to keep the alert consistent regardless of…

So.. heres a story about a lovely la.... supervisor I guess. (Now the Brady Bunch theme is stuck in your heads) We manage over 1100 Cisco devices, along with others from various manufacturers. Until recently, the management of those devices was shared between just a couple of engineers. We had a small license to Cisco…

As Patrick said, Logrhythm but I only wish that more teams would have viability into those logs. I think a "if my nodes are sending you logs then I get access to them" rule should apply. Otherwise, it does me no good.

Right now, we turn to VNQM. Its really our only tool in the area of VoiP at the moment. 

That happened to me for question 14. I dont know if I was award points, because of the not found page, but it looks like I answered correctly. Jim

Thanks for the information on IPSLA... This is an area that I have not done very well in terms of monitoring. I would be interested in how others are monitoring their VoiP networks using Solarwinds specifically. I think there is so much more than what we are currently doing.

This article is about two months too soon for me. We have a project on the horizon to move our virtual DB to a physical server. I am a little nervous but the DB team assures me that it will go fine. 

garetht - I completely agree. I didnt state that correctly. My point was that even if you have redundant circuits for internet, its doubtful (in my opinion) that most companies are installing that bandwidth for your personal pleasure. Jim

I agree and it makes NCM seem so inconsistent with the rest of the Solarwinds Orion suite. Currently am seeing some inconsistent results and it would help me to troubleshoot if I could copy my rule for testing purposes. Jim

That was a really fun Monthly Mission. Of course, all of them are fun but I liked this one.

Constant re-education. When I was young in IT I saw how the changing world of IT was really hard on my mother in law, who was a COBOL programmer. So, I constantly try to learn new things, learn how to do my job faster, learn other skills that are adjacent skills to what I do. IT professionals sell their skills as a…

Great set of articles and hopefully your wrong about it being your last. Jim

We currently are collecting Netflow data but at this time its not used in our IT security departments. I would say that other than finding out who is the big bandwidth hog at the moment, most of our Netflow at this point is just getting playground use. We are picking and poking at it trying to determine what good it will…

Power, QOS, and IP addressing have been the most important to us. The question of power determines what kind of switch you are going to be using or if you'll be needing external power. QOS for quality, of course.. and how does the VoiP system integrate with your IP address schema. I'm a VoiP newbie, so I'll be reading and…

I've never used that it but it has the WAN Killer, which is a traffic generator. 

I would say that currently we dont have proactive alerts. But this article has made me consider it more and more. We typically have critical alerts that blast our phones when major issues are taking place, and then informative alerts that annoy the heck out of us. I'm working on trimming down the informative alerts. Jim

Im green on this but I think it should probably be monitored separately, if for no other reason than when you break things into finer segment then its more easily possible to determine where the issue is. Does it effect mobile, but not web apps as a whole? Then you know to check the widgets that turn the mobile side. Jim

While I have things pretty well set up in terms of reachability, there is still a lot of work to do. This is probably the case for anyone with a rather large complex network. One thing that I realized, while reading this blog, is that I am not monitoring for things like CPU utilization currently. Its never been an issue so…

We do have metrics over time that we can use to display a need for more bandwidth or a change in our network. Often we offer choices with the understanding of what they get for this cost, and what they would get for a slightly higher cost. We try to trend out a few years so that we arent constantly making changes and I…

Security absolutely cost money.. but it cost a lot of money to not have it too. One think I have seen a lot lately is a transition of charging out IT services. It seems at some point we may have to find ways of transitioning the burden of IT costs including security to "money making" costs centers so that IT doesnt look…