We were interviewed recently for a European newspaper article and one of their questions was:
What are the most common mistakes made by employers/IT professionals when it comes to implementing effective network management systems?
Our response was:
The biggest mistake is probably sourcing and acquiring network and application management tools in a vacuum. All too often IT groups have one particular need - could be troubleshooting, and go out and select a packet analysis product. Then another group needs a reporting package and they have to do a search for that, only to find out 8 months later when they want to use NetFlow for application visibility that the reporting tool doesn’t support it. The result? IT organizations end up with a multitude of non-integrated tools that become cumbersome to support and use across the enterprise for unified analysis.
Under this category, I will post information about the availability of different data sources for performing network and application performance management activities, such as standard SNMP MIBs, like MIBII, ATM, and Frame Relay; NetFlow or sFlow; as well as our nGenius Probes. I'll also comment on ways to incorporate other projects your teams are addressing today and in the coming year or two or three to build a cost-effective case for a unified management application to analyze the data sources in your network.
