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?

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