A Day in the Life of a Network Administrator LIFE AFTER WHATSUP GOLD
ABOUT ME
THE ALERT CENTER in
To ensure network availability, we
WhatsUp Gold to better manage
used the Alert Center to set up
our network after a complex out-
individual
age on one of our peak business
thresholds for all our critical assets. Alert
days. Since then, life has been very
Center is pretty cool – it notifies us when
Six
months
ago
we
brought
monitors
and
proactive
My name is Mark Brown and I’m a Network Administrator. I have a degree in Information Technology and have been in my job for almost four years.
MY COMPANY
new applications we are deploying
critical systems and adding on new
– my desk would be clean.but that’s
performance monitors to give us better
I work for a medical device and technology reseller. There are about 80 people at my office, which my boss (Director of IT) and I are responsible for supporting. We do nearly half of our business online and the rest via our telesales team. For a relatively small company, we have a pretty sophisticated infrastructure and some key business apps which need to be available 24x7.
a good problem to have. For now,
visibility into our network. Once we
TECHNOLOGY ENVIRONMENT
let me give you a picture of a typi-
were set up – we could rely on the
cal day in my life with WhatsUp Gold.
outage alerts and the threshold alerts
Our web site and app servers are located in a datacenter upstate but our Email Servers, file servers, VOIP Servers and our demo machines are located right in our server room in the office. Our sales team uses the Webex type conferencing facilities regularly and we moved to a VoIP system completely two years ago.
different. Where chaos and ‘after-thefact’ troubleshooting once ruled, now notifications and alerts help us to minimize
most
problems.
These
days I go home at a decent hour, and if not for the user requests and the
a resource’s performance degrades and before it actually goes down. This helps us to be proactive and reduces the number of problems a user experiences. We spent a couple of weeks tweaking the out of box settings – mostly tightening up the thresholds for our
displayed in the Alert Center to keep us
GETTING STARTED The
WhatsUp
Gold
on top of everything. It put us in control installation
process was pretty easy; a step-by-step Welcome Center made things simple. For discovery, we chose the IP Smart Scan option, where WhatsUp Gold read off the routing tables of our main router and discovered all the assets on our network – basically every work station, network device and server that supported SNMP or had a WMI interface.
of the network and now we aren’t taken by surprise if an outage occurs.
DAY-TO-DAY OPERATIONS I have most of the critical systems alerts sent right to my iPhone. I login to the Web console remotely and am able to further drilldown into the alerts. It’s easy to click through to the individual Alert Center workspace report for a device or system and initiate split second graphing. That tells us how the system or device is doing in real time. If there is an issue, we look into
BEFORE AND AFTER For the last six months, we’ve been using a network and systems management solution called WhatsUp Gold. It basically runs our network infrastructure, so I can focus on what I need to get done. I used to be forever behind schedule, even coming in on weekends. Now, all that has changed and it’s a great feeling personally and professionally to be ahead of what’s going on rather than being behind it.
the historical data to see when the problem started
climb. I logged into the WhatsUp Gold web portal from
and if other resources are stressed. We also set up an
my laptop at home and could see that three separate
acknowledgement in Alert Center to stop future alarms and
devices in the server room were showing up on the
notify other users that the problem is being looked into. If
alerts. That told me this was not an isolated issue with a
an issue is not resolved within a set time, my boss gets an
specific device – as other hardware parameters including
alert too – all part of the Alert Center’s escalation settings.
the fan and power monitors seemed fine. It was a bigger
Alert Center keeps an eye on unauthorized access attempts to our network. For example, Alert Center tells us if there are more than 5 login attempts to a server in a span of less than 5 minutes. It tracks this threshold on our syslog monitors and lets us know of any attempted breaches. Of course it may not be a problem, an authorized user could have caps lock on or have trouble remembering a password – but now we are always in the know. WhatsUp Gold also helps me plan and provision for regular printer and file folder maintenance. I’m alerted if printer toner levels are getting low and can reorder them in advance. Similarly, I have automated visibility into the usage on our network shared drive and individual file/folder sizes – what a timesaver!
problem and if the temperature kept going up through a hot Sunday afternoon some of the servers and other hardware could be permanently damaged. I drove over to the office and when I opened the server room door my concerns were validated. The air conditioner in the server room
wasn’t
working
(the result of some debris from
construction
to
the building). I propped open the server door to generate some air circulation
and
turned
off some of the backup servers. I also called the
WEEKEND AT THE OFFICE
building maintenance company to let them know. However, even with WhatsUp Gold in
IS CRISIS A THING OF THE PAST?
place, life is not
Not completely. WhatsUp Gold tells us a crisis is
without surprises.
brewing before it strikes - and that’s a big help.
One Sunday
When you know a problem may occur, you can make
morning, I received
the changes or adjustments needed to prevent it.
several WhatsUp
Before we had to stumble through the dark to find out why
Gold alerts on my
the network was slow or applications were unavailable.
iPhone informing
And now with WhatsUp Gold looking out for us, everybody
me that the temperature in our server room was high.
is on the same page and dealing with problems is that
Over the next few hours the temperature continued to
much simpler.