Remote Network Performance Monitoring

February 5, 2013 Paul Simoneau Cisco, Cloudera, Featured, Professional Development, Project Management, Routing & Switching, Technology, Training in Business

Each network manager must decide which open source and proprietary solutions offer methods to use to gather and make sense of the performance data. This means a delicate balance of monitoring networks and recognizing that monitoring can add to network traffic. Here we will look into a few of the remote monitoring options.

What to Use to Monitor Network Performance

January 29, 2013 Paul Simoneau Cisco, Cloudera, Featured, Professional Development, Project Management, Routing & Switching, Technology, Training in Business

There are multiple aspects to network monitoring. Most networks can be monitored by device, by segment, or by a combination of the two. Managers can locally monitor devices or network segments by collecting activity statistics with SNMP or by using the extended functionality of a protocol analyzer. Remote network device or segment monitoring is also easy to accomplish. This type of monitoring uses SNMP-based polling of devices for designated values to compare with Network Management Station (NMS) thresholds.

Why Monitor Network Performance?

January 22, 2013 Paul Simoneau Cisco, Cloudera, Featured, Professional Development, Project Management, Routing & Switching, Technology, Training in Business

Network monitoring software is essential with the goal being preventive or proactive solutions and in-depth analysis of what’s happening in organizational networks. Let’s look into some of the biggest reasons your organization should be monitoring network performance

Rapid Spanning Tree

November 29, 2012 Paul Simoneau Cisco, Cloudera, Featured, Professional Development, Project Management, Routing & Switching, Technology, Training in Business

The STP (Spanning Tree Protocol) standard (IEEE 802.1d) was designed when the recovery after an outage could wait a minute or so and be acceptable performance. With Layer 3 switching in LANs, switching began to compete with routers running protocols because they are able to offer faster alternate paths.

Rapid Spanning Tree Protocol (RSTP or IEEE 802.1w) brought the ability to take the twenty seconds of waiting for the Max Age counter plus fifteen seconds of Listening plus fifteen seconds of Learning or fifty seconds down to less than one second for point-to-point connected and edge switches and six seconds for root switches.

Troubleshooting the Switch

November 15, 2012 Paul Simoneau Technology, Training in Business

Beyond configuration, accessing the switch’s console port or connecting across the network, gives us both diagnostic and troubleshooting abilities. Depending on the nature of the problem, some of the following troubleshooting tasks may help when working with switches.