The one sure thing about networks is that they grow continuously. They're like weeds in a summer garden, only harder to keep under control. Needless to say, there are bulky frameworks you can deploy to manage your network, or point products to mix and match into best-of-breed monitoring mayhem. The first approach is costly, time consuming and requires significant in-house expertise; the second way may cost less, but still requires time and specialized in-house smarts. Is there a third way? Perhaps...Read More
We hear it all the time – IT departments are under pressure but budgets and IT staff aren’t growing proportionately. Matters only get worse as disruptive technologies like SaaS, VoIP and virtualization begin to proliferate enterprise networks. Yet network administrators are forced to use highly fragmented, complex, and expensive management solutions that don’t provide good visibility. At what point does the network administrator hit the breaking point…go postal or gets fired because the VoIP system cuts out during prime work hours and the CEO can’t make his phone calls?...Read More
An actuary is defined as "an adviser on financial questions involving probabilities relating to mortality and other contingencies." So, do you know the old joke about actuaries? No, not the one about how they are accountants who found accountancy too exciting. I mean the one that defines actuaries as the guys who come down from the hills after the battle to kill the wounded to make them easier to classify. Don't laugh. If you are going to protect your organization you are destined to become actuaries...Read More
PacketTrap, a network management startup with about 40,000 users, is coming out with a new platform that CEO Steve Goodman says will compete with CA (NSDQ: CA) Unicenter and IBM (NYSE: IBM) Tivoli. You read that right: little PacketTrap versus the two behemoths of systems and network management. Goodman may be crazy, but he’s not stupid...Read More
It can be very advantageous to have a single interface that lets you view and manage a variety of network monitoring and management tools. Besides saving you a lot of time (and desktop real estate), an integrated suite can make it easy to share data among different monitoring tools while allowing you to survey numerous monitors at once, giving you a more complete view of the state of your infrastructure...Read More
The very cool PacketTrap pt360 all-in-one network management application has a new version out - version 2.0. With this version, you get the new Cisco Configuration features (what I have personally been waiting for)! You can download a free 21 day trial version of the software from the PacketTrap Download site (and don’t forget that they have a FREE version too)! I have used this myself and it has been very helpful and has reduced the amount of time it takes to troubleshoot and configure my network...Read More
Historically, network and system management solutions have been expensive to deploy and difficult to maintain. As a result, they're been beyond the grasp of many smaller businesses, but several recent advancements are making these tools more accessible. Network management is complex and requires coordination among many different components. Consequently, building management products has taken vendors a long time and eaten up research and development resources. To recoup their investments, vendors, such as CA, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM, charged high prices for these products and their associated services...Read More
Some management tool vendors are finding inspiration in unlikely places -- from Google to the gaming industry -- in their quest to simplify network management. With voice, data and video flowing over one network, IT professionals need the ability to quickly drill down to the dirty details. In response, vendors have begun offering tools with front-end interfaces more like video games or Web 2.0 sites than traditional network management tools. "The trend is to present the information to the users in a format that's actually usable," said Zeus Kerravala, senior vice president of enterprise research at Yankee Group...Read More
All data center managers have their own “toolbox” of monitoring, management, and debugging programs. But unless they work in a large enterprise IT department that can afford an integrated suite of management tools, such as HP’s OpenView or IBM’s Tivoli line, they must use their network tools individually, without being able to flow data between them or view results from multiple programs simultaneously. Having to deal with standalone network management tools has long been a fact of life for data center managers in small and midsized enterprises...Read More
PacketTrap VP of Field Operations, Michael Blonsky, was featured on Internet blogging site Lovemytool.com and was a speaker at SharkFest, the conference dedicated to the Wireshark (previously called Ethereal) open source project. We really enjoyed ourselves at the conference and it once again proves that PacketTrap is leading Silicon Valley commercial companies in an effort to embrace open source solutions...Read More