CIO Council Report: Network Management and Web 2.0
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October 2007
CIO Council - Network Management
You've done your research, spent innumerable hours making the decision, are really excited with your new investment and now simply expect it to work. You could be talking about buying that shiny new car, but you're talking about your investment in Information Technology. But they don't always work and tracking down the cause can be a long and laborious task. The members of the CIO Council, led by Nick Timmerman and Dee Rindler from Midmark Corporation, shared their experiences and insights during its August meeting.
Network management tools come in all shapes, sizes, abilities and costs. Before filling your tool chest, however, your first step should be to create a clear strategy that addresses several key areas including timeliness, scope, complexity and value.
Are your needs reactive in nature, or is there significant value in having early warning to problems? Reactive tools, such as Sniffer or Wireshark, become useful after the receipt of a user trouble call and help pinpoint the cause of a problem, assuming the problem is ongoing. Proactive tools are constantly vigilant and can provide instantaneous notification as soon as it detects something out of the norm. Seems like a simple decision, but proactive tools can require a significant amount of setup and can suffer from a malady called a "false positive", which can tie up valuable time looking at a situation that is not really a problem. Even worse, too many false positives can result in alerts being ignored. Remember the story about the boy who cried wolf? Same idea here.
There are literally thousands of moving parts in today's IT-based services and each could be monitored in-depth. Are you going to monitor just a few key points hoping to catch ninety-plus percent of the problems, or keep an eye on dozens in order to push yourself into the high nineties? Are you going to keep an eye only on the hardware components, include application monitoring or keep track of the status of an entire business process? Your answers will drive the cost, complexity and integration necessary to achieve your goals. Gaining alignment with the business on this key area will save you some difficult future discussions.
A more technical consideration is the amount of integration your network management toolkit requires. A centralized management system can take alerting information from the individual tools, apply configuration information and quickly determine where the root cause lies. For example, if a wide-area network connection is down to one of your remote locations, then hundreds of downstream resources may appear to have problems, even though there is a single cause. Keeping a current and accurate configuration database is not a trivial undertaking, but may save your business costly downtime.
The big names in network management include H-P's OpenView, BMC's Patrol, IBM's (Tivoli) Netview and Computer Associates' (CA) UniCenter. These products provide comprehensive and integrated solutions covering networks, systems and applications. Hardware vendors typically offer their own point solutions to centrally configure and monitor their products. At the other end of the spectrum, numerous Open Source projects, such as Nagios, Zenoss Core, Hyperic HQ, and the previously mentioned Wireshark, could be your answer to affordable network management.
For more information on this topic, please contact Ann Gallaher, Chief Operating Officer, at 937.229.9072 or email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .
CIO Council - Web 2.0
Hard to believe that the Internet, as most of us have known it, is entering its teenage years. The web browser, boosted by high-speed and wireless access, has transformed our ability to access information, make purchases, trade and bargain, and, of course, get inundated with email. But the web is growing up as it transforms from a one-size-fits-all static information behemoth into a platform for all types of social interactions, focused information delivery and interactive applications. The CIO Council focused its July meeting discussing Web 2.0, which was facilitated by Ray Brothers of NCR Corporation, an early adopter of Web 2.0 to improve their internal operations.
One key difference with Web 2.0 is that users actively participate in their areas of interest, rather than being a passive recipient. Blogs, wikis, and podcasts are some of the new technologies that allow people to share and build upon ideas, improve their communication through embedded video and audio and build groups based on their common interests.
Gone are the days when a web page for you was the same as the web page for me. Web portals now offer personalization capabilities so the tools and resources we each need most often can be located where each of us finds it best. Aggregation combines content from Web sites, databases, and other sources and then makes it available via the portal. One of the best example of aggregation is the use of RSS (Real Simple Syndication) within a portal such as My.Yahoo. Large amounts of customized information can be reviewed quickly and explored in-depth as desired.
Perhaps the flashiest of the Web 2.0 capabilities are its Rich Internet Applications, such as Google Maps or Kayak.com. These applications are getting close to delivering the same level of "high-touch" and interactiveness introduced by PC applications, but without the need to install, maintain or support software on individual PCs. And they are available on any PC connected to the Internet.
But for those of us that would like to reminisce the early days of the Internet, go to www.archive.org and explore its "Wayback Machine". Enter your favorite web site (e.g. www.whitehouse.gov) and see how their web pages have changed over the years. I think you'll agree the Internet has come a long way in a short time.
Explore the Tech Source program at www.gdita.org/techsource.php to locate Dayton area companies that offer web site creation and hosting.
For more information on this topic, please contact Ann Gallaher, Chief Operating Officer, at 937.229.9072 or email
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
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Footnote: This article was originated using Google Docs, another great example of Web 2.0 technology.
