How did you make out with your bracket selection? No, I did not have George Mason in the final four either; in fact, two of my favorites were out far earlier than I expected, Boston College and U Conn. Oh well, there’s always next year :(
More importantly, how did your network fare during March Madness? I am happy to say ours did not crash, but we did experience a couple of surprises. Of course, it is easy for us to monitor our WAN trunks for troubleshooting and capacity planning issues on a regular basis with our nGenius Performance Management System. Well, on Thursday the 16th, we were creating activity on own workstations streaming the early rounds of the tournament over live video. We discovered that each session consumed 374 Kbps of bandwidth, and just 5 of us could consume up a full T1 pretty quickly.
Ah, but, our IT Help Desk received its first call complaining about slowness on the Internet, and we had evidence that showed it was not just because of the streaming video. We had watched one of our engineers downloading a Linux upgrade from the Red Hat site that was consuming 2 to 4 Mbps of bandwidth for more than an hour between 1:30 and 2:30 PM East coast time, followed by two Dell patch downloads of 10Mbps bandwidth each. Where we only have five T1’s or approximately 7.5Mbps of bandwidth, of which streaming video and now the software downloads were eating up a fair portion of it, there was not much left for other business purposes.
So after all this, NetScout has a policy decision on its hands. Should activities like Linux upgrades, Dell patches and the like be downloaded during business hours, or should they be performed before 9 AM or after 5 PM. Or does it really even impact performance that often to require a policy at all? We are still mulling that over.
However, the most compelling lesson we took away from our March Madness experience was that monitoring the network for a one time planned event is less important than having the tools available every day for the surprises that inevitably occur in the network. Hey, I would love to hear what happened in your network – drop me a comment!
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