Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

You’ve just received a notification—a major network issue has occurred. Hoping it’s a false positive, you complete an initial triage. Dang it! It’s the real thing. If you’re like me, your mind likely turns to one thing: fixing the issue as fast as you can. But hold on! Before you turn completely to fixing it, there’s another important aspect to any incident that you can’t forget, and that’s incident communication.

There are plenty of options for network monitoring tools today, and that can make it hard to pick the right one for you. Here, we’ll help you sort through your options by taking a look at the 10 best network monitoring tools available today, provide a crash course on network monitoring, and explain what you should look for in a network monitoring tool.

Why SaaS could make your IT skills irrelevant. Headlines like this are scary, right? Well, that article was from back in 2008. Do you feel irrelevant? No, you say? That’s what I thought… There’s no binary transition point when a skill becomes totally irrelevant. IT is always evolving. This shouldn’t be scary. Imagine if you hadn’t evolved your skills since 2000. Or 2010. What are the things you’d be behind on now?

A significant portion of companies have vulnerabilities in their network management practices. These vulnerabilities include a lack of network visibility, configuration backups, proactive network planning, and up-to-date documentation. Despite these vulnerabilities, the majority of IT pros report high confidence in their networks, indicating a potential mismatch between perception and reality.

If this past year has proven anything, it’s that making long-term predictions can be a challenge. After all, who would have predicted a large portion of the workforce would be fully remote and we’d be staying six feet away from each other in grocery stores for most of the year? Even though a curveball like COVID-19 could happen at any time, it doesn’t mean we should completely stop forecasting what things will look like in IT and beyond over the coming months.

First off, I’m going to make an assumption: I’m going to assume you—like me—have spent a lot more time online in 2020 than you ever have before. Thanks to COVID-19, we were all at home with nowhere to go. Many people started working full-time from home, and kids were out of school for months as springtime lockdowns extended into summer holidays.

As a network admin or a network manager, you’re likely using a ton of software and tools—from network monitoring tools like Auvik to ITSMs like ServiceNow to communications apps like Microsoft Teams. With a lot of tools comes a lot of data, which can show you how your network and your team are performing over a period of time. The challenge is putting all of those pieces together to see the bigger picture.