rschroeder · NAM SME · ✭✭✭✭✭

I suspect your link to the programming falsehoods is the most widely shared bit of this version of The Actuator. I think my I.T. friends will get a smile from it. Thanks for bringing it to our attention!

Here's a different kind of Fluke product we use frequently with great success. I estimate it saves us two F.T.E.'s every year in wasted time. This particular tool runs about $300, and lets a single person test connectivity from an access device like a PC or printer all the way back through all the cables into the switch…

And remember to try bacon where no bacon has gone before! The post about Bacon Roses was a fun one!

As we are forced to wear more hats and take on more responsibility, with new and different technologies, without removing old technologies and responsibilities, we have need for monitoring solutions like Solarwinds to make us better able to more prevent, or more quickly identify, problems. If price point and hardware and…

Better pictographs than petroglyphs!

We're purchasing more and more Meraki as solutions to replace things like our old Cisco ASA 5505's. I won't be surprised to see we have over a hundred Meraki appliances/solution within the next months. 

I like the idea, but I'm a little skeptical of the implementation and its veracity. It's one thing for me to install Solarwinds products on my internal network, even to purchase and install a Gigamon enterprise setup on my internal network or in the data centers. It's quite another to trust someone else to provide the same…

Seriously, the travel cost reduction to Great Britain--I'm not going, but what a great opportunity! How much will you save, either in $ or in %? Robot work force? Get used to it. Japan and Detroit have gone down this path, as have many manufacturers around the work--especially in sterile medical / IT or high-production…

I built a manual solution in NPM to display and alert when any resilient links go down, and I called its view "Critical Interfaces." It was tedious to set up, but all it involved was identifying and selecting all resilient links and putting them into a special group that is polled more frequently and which alerts more…

Amazing. Also impressive is how the locals have managed to make the streets passable despite the destruction. Or, maybe Harvey cleared the streets for them on its way through, taking homes & roofs with it?

It seems you'd be able to get this info via a UnDP and the MIB/OID info provided by Avaya, or discovered through a MIB walk. I take it you've had no success with either of these paths?

When I initially implemented Orion monitoring, I'd inherited a network full of problematic hardware with bad firmware. When something went down, there wasn't a Dependencies part of NPM to reduce alerts, and a large flood of pages would go out. The flood was so large that it overwhelmed and disabled the local paging…

We're moving to Gigamon tapping / sharing infrastructure for that very reason--big ports. 10 Gig ports in 4-port port-channels, 40 Gig ports doing the same. Not inexpensive.

We're using an evolving deployment of NAC that leverages ACI, FireSIGHT/ASA, and ISE. Ultimately every log ends up in Splunk, and is reviewed/managed by a separate IS Security team, who will work in combination with the Network and End User Support Teams. I see challenges with managing the "allowed hardware" databases and…

I think if you persuade me to spend beaucoup dollars on something I can't see, on something I can't secure physically, and on something I can't monitor completely--you've done a great job of pulling the wool over my eyes. What do we KNOW about cloud security? * We cannot prove or verify its physical security. * Is our data…

All seems to be looking as expected. Thank you for following up, and for doing such a great job helping us help others and enjoy your web site and your products! Rick

Let's play devil's advocate and turn this question upside down: "What parts of your work environment should NOT involve collaboration?" I can't think of any in my Health Care environment. Doctors collaborate with their peers, with nurses, with patients, with administration, with custodial staff, with state & federal…

OMG! You're putting Hermione Granger against Genie from Aladdin? Frankly, how could ANYONE go against Genie? PHENOMENAL COSMIC POWER . . . (itty-bitty living space). Hey, I LOVE Hermione--brains, skill, talent, British accent, youth--she beats ALL other possible sidekicks for her personal worth and code of ethics and…

I totally get this. Bookmarked!

There's a load of brainwork in there--thank you for sharing your thoughts on the topic. Copying & pasting the text into SMOG produced some fun analyses of the readability of that technical information: http://www.readabilityformulas.com/freetests/six-readability-formulas.php I'm happy my comprehension was 100%. Thwack…

I claim "dibs" on any points for discovering & reporting first that the link to today's Hint is broken.

Exactly. Monitoring "everything" may result in an information flood that does you no good. But not managing enough, or the right items, can be as bad--or worse. Being ignorant of changing conditions that can/will impact your clients, staff, or yourself--that's a place none of us want to be.

I agree with @"aLTeReGo". My Solarwinds installations have been up to 100 facilities, ~60,000 active IP addresses, 100 firewalls, 3000 AP's, etc. Since you're doing a second Solarwinds instance can you export your existing network nodes and then import them into the new instance. Is that not possible, or not desirable for…

Perhaps this explains it well for some folks:

Impressive! Somehow it's also more intuitive to read and let me think I understand it. Thank you, bobmarley​!

I'm a supporter of using a belt-and-suspender solution to keeping from being embarrassed. One does not want their actions to become the focus of irate customers, nor their company to show up in the newspaper/TV/Radio/blogs as having a problem that should have been prevented. That means setting up your network equipment to…

Not only is the bacon juicy, but the topics and links aren't even rumors! What more could you ask for?

You really had me when you discovered/remembered you really need to write from the core of the program if you want success at the edge. I find that to be true in my daily network analysis tasks, and ALSO in my musical performance. I had the good fortune to perform two gigs this past weekend with an excellent Elvis…

Sigh. When the users call to complain, when e-mail won't open, when O365 doesn't work . . . Yep. "Patience." It's what we need when we'd rather get our jobs done instead of waiting for the cloud to deliver our apps & files. Thanks goodness SW apps show the problems not in MY network!

Do you remember the early days of Desert Storm and Operation Enduring Freedom when unsecured 802.11b was in use by our side on the battlefield? The opposition was able to access it and use it to gather intel against our side--until more encryption was invented and deployed. It would be sad to see the statistics of that…