The Growing Impact of Social Networking Trends on Lawful Interception Lawful Interception (LI) is the legal process by which a communications network operator or Service Provider (SP) gives authorized officials access to the communications of individuals or organizations. With security threats mushrooming in new directions, LI is more than ever a priority and major focus of Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs). Regulations such as the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), mandate...

There are many famous debates in history: dogs vs cats, vanilla vs chocolate & Coke vs Pepsi just to name a few. In the IT world, one of the more common debates is “single platform vs point solution”. That is, when it comes to the best way to monitor and manage a network, is it better to have a single management platform that can do multiple things, or would it be better to have an array of tools that are each specialized for a job? The choice can be thought of as being between Multitaskers ...

Viavi Solutions Launches GigaStor Software Edition for Virtual and Cloud Environments Solution Delivers Fast and Accurate Troubleshooting and Assurance in Next Generation Network Architecture (NASDAQ: VIAV) Viavi Solutions Inc. (“Viavi”) today announced it is expanding its portfolio of software-defined network test and monitoring solutions with the new GigaStor Software Edition to manage performance and user experience in virtual and cloud environments. The new software configurations, which Via...

Remember the “good old days” when everyone that worked got in their car and drove to a big office building every day? And any application that a user needed was housed completely within the walls of the corporate datacenter? And partners / customers had to dial a phone to get a price or place an order? Well, if you are as old as I am, you may remember those days – but for the vast majority you reading this, you may think of what I just described as being about as common as a black and white TV. ...

Oh. My. God. This time it IS the network! How to prevent - or recover from - a network disaster Join Jason Farrer, Sales Engineer with Infosim® Inc. for a Webinar and Live Demo on “How to prevent – or recover from – a network disaster”.   This Webinar will provide insight into: Why is it important to provide for a network disaster? How to deal with network disaster scenarios [Live Demo] How to prevent network corruption & enhance network security Watch Now! A recording of this...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 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...

NetFlow is a feature that was introduced on Cisco routers that provides the ability to collect IP network traffic as it enters or exits an interface. By analyzing the data provided by NetFlow, a network administrator can determine things such as the source and destination of traffic, class of service, and the causes of congestion. There are numerous key metrics when it comes to Netflow Monitoring: 1-Netflow Top Talkers The flows that are generating the heaviest system traffic are known as the "t...

It’s one of the most dreaded calls to get for an IT staff member – the one where a user complains about the quality of their VoIP call or video conference. The terms used to describe the problem are reminiscent of a person who brings their car in for service because of a strange sound “ I hear a crackle”, or “it sounds like the other person is in a tunnel” or “I could only hear every other word – and then the call dropped”. None of these are good, and unfortunately, they are all very hard to dia...

Your looking at doing an upgrade to your VoIP system, as it approaching end of life.   But your network has changed substantially since your first deployment, making this an ideal time to investigate new VoIP systems and ensure your existing monitoring solution can keep pace with the upgrade. Here are 4 critical areas for consideration to determine whether your monitoring tools can keep pace with the new demands of a VoIP upgrade. 1. SUPPORTING MORE THAN ONE IT TEAM: If you have a voic...

In the three previous blogs in this series, I answered an often asked customer question – “What can really be done to improve network visibility?” – with discussions on data and packet conditioning, advanced filtering, and automated data center capability. In the fourth part of this blog series, I’ll reveal another set of features that can further improve network visibility and deliver even more verifiable benefits. Too quickly summarize, this multi-part blog covers an in-depth view of various f...