I'm hosting a webinar next week on Effective WAN Management and I'm trying to come up with the content. Problem is - I can't seem to put anything down on paper today. You know how it is - sometimes either that part of your brain just doesn't want to engage or the other parts don't want to give up control (probably a little of both in my case).
Anyhow, I'm looking for some help. Send me your ideas and I'll send a T-shirt your way. Caveat - T-shirts are for the first three people to contribute more than a couple of sentences. If I try to give away more than that at any one time they'll shoot me...
Josh
Hi Josh. I am sure you will be talking about the obvious things in your webinar. One small thing where Orion has helped us is knowing when our backup links have kicked in. Lets say we are monitoring a node at a remote site that has a primary and a backup WAN link. Something happens to our WAN transport and the primary link to this site is no longer passing traffic. The remote node and even the primary WAN interface on that node are still "up", so we wouldn't get an alert. What we have done that has helped us is to set up alerts on all of our backup circuits so if any traffic is detected (we set up a threshold) we get an alert.
OK, I admit it... I am just trying to get a Tee-shirt! But honestly, in our infrastructure (there are boxes to which we do not have monitoring access along the WAN links) this has saved us several times. -Debbi
Debbi - Thanks for the note!!! Drop me an e-mail with your mailing address, shirt size, and etc...
NetFlow. We've been using Crannog's product (now Fluke's), for a few years. I've been waiting for the SolarWinds product. Tell us about it. Compare it to Fluke's.
Go with the basics:
Use what people NEED, vs what people WANT, vs what's available.
There's so much pie-in-the-sky stuff out there, that it's sometimes good to have a 'Gordian knot' aproach - cut through all the padding & deal with the primary issues of WAN management again.
Remember that engineers LOVE new toys, but when it comes to the beancounters dishing out, there needs to be a solid set of core functionality both on paper & in reality.
Cheers, G.
Ekonowal,
With regards to comparing our NetFlow application to Fluke's; honestly, they're both pretty solid products. The primary difference will be the added benefit of having your NetFlow data truly integrated with Orion.
Being able to see the "big picture" when you have an issue is very important. The fact that with our solution you can see how much bandwidth is being consumed along with who is using it and what for on the same screen with what it's doing to the router in terms of CPU, buffers, memory, etc and review these stats over time or compared with a different site of similar characteristics is the real advantage.