Friday, Friday the day we all adore, except fish that is

Continuing work on the report, and still doing the out-lines, my aim is to finish them today, but a colleague is ill so I have volunteered to do his duty analyst slot, which fits my plans fine.

I have a call with an end-user today on the report to discuss how they have approached IT strategy, all good background for the report. Do not forget to complete the survey please.

It’s the Network no it’s the Application

Sounds like a playground squabble, well that life in most silo’ed IT departments. This situation has given rise to a new generation of monitoring tools, such as Netscout, they are passive none intrusive, using either port mirroring or passive tapping techniques.

The benefit is that these tools can monitor the packet level transmissions, this level of information is important to understand normal behaviour. The problem with tools has been that they generate vast amounts of data, and it took time to analyse it and make it relevant.

Today, these tools can provide sub-second real-time data, and present this in different ways to match the audience. Therefore, it is not surprising that many telco’s are using these tools to ensure quality of service.

Beware, the benefits are great, but ask what effort is required to set-up and administer the tool once operational, that is where you will find the good tool from the bad.