The Packet Scoop

I recently read an article were the CTO of a web 2.0 company said that IT infrastructure was becoming like electricity. He said he doesn’t worry about IT infrastructure at all, that he just plugs into the cloud and really doesn’t care about what’s going on in it. He said that all their application development [...]

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I am constantly amazed how Les Stroud of Discovery Channel’s Survivor Man can overcome extreme conditions with nothing more than basic tools. No food, no water, just his instincts and creativity. This makes me think of today’s network administrators trying to survive extremely complex networks with old, outdated network management systems (NMS).
A recent article in [...]

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I once sat next to a guy on an airplane who worked for Proctor & Gamble. After noticing his business card on his bag, I said “what do you do for P&G?”. He said “I sell toilet paper.” Within a moment I knew exactly what he did. He didn’t have to tell me anything more. [...]

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All of us at PacketTrap have been involved in other successful technology startups, but this is the first time most of us have been directly involved in mass distribution of free software. Over five thousand Network Engineers, IT Administrators and SySAdmins have registered and used our network management and network monitoring software.
These people are [...]

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The concept of Dashboards has been around forever, but because most of the data was static, required heavy-lifting manual updates, and provided information overload, they really never delivered on their promise of visibility. Today however, there is a trend towards more advanced business and network monitoring than ever before. These automated, real-time dashboards will help [...]

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Earlier this week we announced the formation of the PacketTrap Advisory Board. I am pleased that these respected members of our industry have decided to help us build a world class network management company. There is a clear pain point in the market for more affordable, more intuitive, and less complex solutions to manage networks. [...]

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Mid market companies, defined by PacketTrap as business with between 250 and 5,000 end points, are finally starting to adopt VoIP at a strong rate. This is both good news and bad news. First, traditionally PBX phone system support has not been part of the job description of the IT department. That is, PBX systems [...]

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First things first:

In what order would you prioritize network management tools / network management software requirements?

End Point Management (servers most specifically)
Pipes and Traffic (managing latency issues etc)
Application Management (Exchange, SQL Server, etc)
Plumbing (routers, hubs, switches etc)
Inventory Management
Software Provisioning
Remote Office Management
Help Desk
Remote Worker Laptops Fleets
NAC including VPN (and SSL-VPN)
Virtual Machine Monitoring
VoIP Monitoring / Management

The beauty and [...]

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