There is nothing more grand than a beautifully configured Cisco network carelessly streaming video, voice and everything in between.  Any modern business would be hard-pressed to do without their network.  Even a brief outage, let alone an extended outage due to equipment failure, would impact productivity in your business, yet often the Cisco networks that we build function so well that customers sometimes forget that these highly complex information interchanges are not "Plug and Play".  Granted, the MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) for a Cisco Catalyst 2960-48TT is pegged at 339,743 hours (or approximately 38 years, 9 months) and, coupled with Cisco's SmartNet service for software upgrades and hardware replacement, you have covered everything that you can from the hardware side, but when something does happen, how will you know?  Perhaps more important, how will you know before something happens

Every network admin, architect and engineer can relate stories of the unexpected and undetected wrecking havoc on a Monday morning.  From weekend lightning storms that can damage equipment to that construction crew down the street that just sliced through your service provider's fiber bundle; the unexpected does happen.  While those are catastrophic events that, as long as they happen during your "standard business hours", someone is bound to notice, more subtle dangers lurk for your shiny new network, especially when nobody is watching.  New applications and services for internal and external customers can place unexpected loads on your network, particularly when implementing new features across WAN connected offices.  New servers, disaster recovery processes and procedures or even that summer intern downloading the latest episode of Heros in high-defintion - they all have the potential to change your humming network into an off-key rendition of our national anthem.  So, what do you do?

Network monitoring via SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor is the answer.  Your shiny new network, once installed and functioning tip-top, should be monitored, 24x7x365.  Of course, you don't want to pay for a body to sit and watch the network, you want something to tell you when something isn't right without shelling out for an FTE.  SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (or NPM for short) provides an excellent web interface into the status of your entire network.  Sure, NPM provides the "standard" features that we all expect out of our network management platforms - graphical network layouts, up/down status and current status of both network interfaces (just how much bandwidth is that intern using?) and the physical devices that are your beloved network.  (How many power supplies does that Cisco 6500 series have!?!?)  Where the NPM really shines is the historical reporting which allows you to baseline your network.  Baselining, which involves a study of statistical data over the period of a standard business cycle, allows you to know how your network "normally" runs.  That baseline allows you to set thresholds for everything from bandwidth, CPU and memory usage, to fan speeds and power output from your servers.  Leveraging ICMP, SNMP (v1,2 and 3) and even Microsofts' handy-dandy WMI, NPM measures your network and notifies you via email, web alert, text message or, if you really want to, flashing marquees and wailing sirens, when something deviates outside of your custom baseline.

While knowing when your network is down is a great advantage, the reality is your users and customers will likely notify shortly (sometimes it feels like nanoseconds) after you get your first outage alert.  If that's the case, why monitor and baseline at all?  Pre-emptive maintenance.  So your firewall is protected by a UPS, but the batteries are starting to fail and slowly losing charge.  Monitoring your network equipment can tell you it's time to swap them out.  That VoIP conference-call with the overseas office and the board of directors - all of them - eating critical WAN bandwidth?  Before that call drops you will see network traffic spiking and can implement QoS to maintain the call while killing that intern's errant Bit Torrent downloads.  Network monitoring gets all the glamour when you can fix an outage in record time, but only you and your IT department will know when your trusty network monitoring platform kick started the whole IT department into pre-emptive maintenance mode and saved the day - without anyone missing a byte.

The SolarWinds suite offers the Network Performance Monitor as their foundation offering.  Your monitoring foundation can be expanded to help you manage your IP address ranges, your network device configurations, application performance, VoIP and wireless networks and even provide a real-time (and historical)  protocol level network analysis utilizing NetFlow, JFlow and SFlow information standard in many leading equipment manufacturers.  With all the available information, coupled with the expertise of Bulletproof engineers and their decades of network management experience, the only question that remains is - Do you see what I see?

If you are interested in seeing how network monitoring can help you and your business save the day contact Bulletproof Solutions, Inc. at 506-452-8558 or drop us a line at info@bulletproofsi.com