Much like monitoring the heath of your body, monitoring the health of your IT systems can get complicated. There are potentially hundreds of data points that you could monitor, but I am often asked by customers to help them decide what they should monitor. This is mostly due to there being so many available KPI options that can be implemented. However, once you begin to monitor a particular KPI, then to some degree you are implicitly stating that this KPI must be important (since I am monitoring...

Bell Canada claims it is the first in North America to roll out commercial tri-band LTE Advanced (LTE-A) network technology, giving customers in Toronto, Hamilton, Oakville and Halifax access to mobile data downlink speeds up to a theoretical maximum 290Mbps from 21 August 2015, when the new Samsung Galaxy S6 edge+ and Galaxy Note5 smartphones become available. Expected average mobile data speeds are 12Mbps to 87Mbps. Bell will expand its new tri-band 290Mbps LTE-A network – based on 700MHz, 210...

Hospital examination rooms, the ER and the various operating rooms are always filled with patients looking to recover from their ailments or diseases, recovering all the way to full health. Hospitals and their employees provide the place and care for these patients to become full operational people. The need to go to several different areas of the hospital facility throughout the day, to get examined or x-rays performed, is necessary in order to heal the ailments. Most of these patients, however...

Blind spots are a long-established threat to virtual data centers. They are inherent to virtual machine (VM) usage and technology due to the nature of VMs, lack of visibility for inter- and intra-VM data monitoring, the typical practices around the use of VM’s, and the use of multiple hypervisors in enterprise environments. Virtual machines by their nature hide inter- and intra-VM traffic. This is because the traffic stays within in a very small geographic area. As I mentioned in a previous blog...

Release 5.3.2 includes improved 'AUTO' configuration options for Layer-3 traffic and Wifi-Capacity plugin. Some initial HotSpot 2.0-R2 support. Improved 802.11 AC stability and features. Do better job of cleaning up stuck NFS mounts. Support 4.0.4 kernel and Fedora-21 to support the latest hardware and OS features. This release provides Linux 4.0 kernel support, HotSpot 2.0-r2 authentication, and improves 802.11AC support. Release 5.3.2 (July 31, 2015) New Features & Improvements Layer-3: Su...

Whether it is the middle of the day, or the middle of the night nobody who is in charge of a network wants to get "that call". There is a major problem and the network is down. It usually starts with one or two complaints “hey, I can’t open my email” or “something is wrong with my web browser” but those few complaints suddenly turn into many and you suddenly you know there is a real problem. What you may not know, is what to do next. In this blog post, I will examine some basic troubleshooting s...

Delivers industry’s first visibility solution that includes stateful SSL decryption to improve application performance and security forensics Ixia (Nasdaq: XXIA), a leading provider of application performance and security resilience solutions, announced it has extended its Application and Threat Intelligence (ATI) Processor™ to include stateful, bi-directional SSL decryption capability for application monitoring and security analytics tools. Stateful SSL decryption provides complete session info...

Canada’s fourth largest cellular operator by subscribers Wind Mobile has won approval from the telecoms ministry Industry Canada to transfer its unused AWS (1700MHz/2100MHz) spectrum licences in the Prairie provinces of Manitoba and Saskatchewan to the two regions’ respective incumbent telcos Manitoba Telecom Services (MTS Allstream) and SaskTel, which will each add the frequencies to their existing 4G LTE bandwidth. SaskTel CEO Ron Styles said in a press release: ‘Our 4G LTE network in the nine...

Network discovery is the process of identifying devices attached to a network. It establishes the current state and health of your IT infrastructure. It’s essential for every business due to the fact that without the visibility into your entire environment you can’t successfully accomplish even the basics of network management tasks. When looking into why Network Discovery is critical to IT success there are three key factors to take into consideration. 1. Discovering the Current State & Hea...

One of the most fundamental best practices of any IT organization is to have a backup strategy and system in place for critical systems and devices. This is clearly needed for any disaster recovery situation and most IT departments have definitive plans and even practiced methodologies set in place for such an occurrence. However what many IT pros don’t always consider is how useful it is to have backups for reasons other than DR and the fact that for most network devices (and especially ro...

Quebec-based quadruple-play operator Videotron has confirmed plans to introduce broadband speeds of 1Gbps-plus on its cable network, up from its current top speed of 200Mbps. A press release said that Videotron is enabling households and businesses in the Greater Montreal area to reach ‘and even exceed’ 1Gbps, with testing of the new service ongoing in the city. Thanks to TeleGeography for the article. 

As a part of our commitment to innovation, Sapling is proud to introduce our new Slim Line Analog Clocks featuring a lower profile, ABS case. The Slim Line Analog Clocks are offered with a black case, a brushed aluminum finish, or a wooden case and are available with all four (IP, Wired, Wireless, and TalkBack) Sapling synchronized clock systems! Highlights of the new Slim Line Analog Clocks include: More case options! Solid Wood Case with Cherry Finish Brushed Aluminum Finish New and easier wal...

Set up a Mobile Forensics Unit Anywhere On June 22, Network Instruments announced the launch of its new GigaStor Portable 10 Gb Wire Speed retrospective network analysis (RNA) appliance. The new portable configuration utilizes solid state drive (SSD) technology to stream traffic to disk at full line rate on full-duplex 10 Gb links without dropping packets. “For network engineers, remotely troubleshooting high-speed networks used to mean leaving powerful RNA tools behind, and relying on a softwar...

Please join NMSaaS CTO John Olson for a demonstration of our free Network Discovery, Asset & Inventory Solution. Wed, Jul 29, 2015 1:00 PM - 1:30 PM CDT Do any of these problems sound familiar? My network is complex and I don’t really even know exactly what we have and where it all is. I can’t track down interconnected problems I don’t know when something new comes on the network I don’t know when I need upgrades I suspect we are paying too much for maintenance NMSaaS is here to help. Sign u...

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) yesterday announced new measures in the wholesale fixed broadband market, including a ruling forcing the country’s largest internet providers to open up their high speed fibre-based access networks to smaller rivals. The regulator said the measures are to foster competition and provide Canadians with more choice and innovative services at reasonable prices. Following an extensive review, the CRTC found that: ‘the large incumb...

The Hacking Team’s Adobe Flash zero day exploit CVE-2015-5119, as well as other exploits, were recently disclosed. Hacking Team sells various exploit and surveillance software to government and law enforcement agencies around the world. In order to keep their exploits working as long as possible, Hacking Team does not disclose their exploits. As such, the vulnerabilities remain open until they are discovered by some other researcher or hacker and disclosed. This particular exploit is a fairly st...

All good network monitoring / management begins the same way – with an accurate inventory of the devices you wish to monitor. These systems must be on boarded into the monitoring platform so that it can do its job of collecting KPI’s, backing up configurations and so on. This onboarding process is almost always initiated through a discovery process. This discovery is carried out by the monitoring system and is targeted at the devices on the network. The method of targeting may vary, from a simpl...

How to visualize the state of your network and service infrastructure to uncover the hidden treasures in your data Join Harald Höhn, Sea Captain and Senior Developer on a perilous treasure hunt on "How to visualize the state of your network and service infrastructure to uncover the hidden treasure in your data". This Webinar will provide insight into: How to speed up your workflows with auto-generated Weather Maps How to outline complex business processes with Weather Maps How to uncover the hid...

Visibility. Network visibility. Simple terms that are thrown around quite a bit today. But the reality isn’t quite so simple. Why? Scale for one. It’s simple to maintain visibility for a small network. But large corporate or enterprise networks? That’s another story altogether. Visibility solutions for these large networks have to scale from one end of the network to the other end – from the campus and branch office edge to the data center and/or private cloud. Managing and troubleshooting perfo...

There cannot be a price put on to the value of leadership, which is defined as the action of guiding or managing a group of people or an organization, in any life endeavor. As former President John Quincy Adams one said, “If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.” The leader within Sapling’s synchronized clock system is our Master Clock, which are manufactured right here at our headquarters in Huntingdon Valley, Pa. No matter which Sapli...