Network Management - On Demand

Outlines the properties of on demand tools and why they are important.

I’m sitting at my desk minding my own business when the phone rings.

"Hello, is that the help desk? My [fill in the name of your application] isn’t working. What are you going to do about it?"

And so begins another frantic troubleshooting session to try to resolve a user’s problem. Thing is, if it’s a network problem it probably isn’t just a single user who will be jamming your phone. And they won’t necessarily be junior staff members either.

Problems can happen anytime and anywhere. How do you cope? Well, firstly you start with a strategy devised long before the user starts shouting at you down the phone.

You need two main elements to your strategy:

Monitoring Tools

You need to be monitoring your network (and servers) on a continuous basis. That way you get to know what is normal. When troubleshooting you can then tell when something isn’t normal that might be causing your problem.

A Toolkit of Ad-hoc tools

A set of tools that you can deploy in order to see what’s going on or to probe your network for information. These tools can be as simple as the ping program shipped with most operating systems or as sophisticated as a full blown protocol analyzer. Network discovery tools (like nmap) are particularly helpful too.

Ad-hoc tools by definition need to be installed anywhere the need arises, when the need arises. If you need a tool and you have to purchase it, chances are that the purchasing process at your organization is so slow and complex that it takes days if not weeks for your tool purchase to work it’s way through the system. Similarly, vendor sales processes can be slow too. In my experience, buying software can be a major hassle even without your own purchasing department getting in the way. Meanwhile you are still trying to figure out your problem. There are two strategies for solving this difficulty:

  1. Buy enough spare copies of all of the software you may need when troubleshooting. Trouble with this strategy is that you end up with an awful lot of money sitting on the shelf not doing anything. Some of it you may never use. You’ll need deep pockets for this strategy to work.
  2. Use software that can be deployed on demand. Say you have a user workstation that won’t connect to the email server, what do you do? Well, first you make sure the email server is still up. Then what? Well, ideally, you’d go to the user workstation, install a protocol analyzer and capture the conversation between the email client on the user workstation and the server. That should give you a few pointers as to what’s going wrong. Easier said than done if you are not using on demand software.

How do we define on demand software?

What software is there that satisfies all of these criteria? Open source is the only software that is able to deliver on all of the points listed.

About the Author

Denis Laverty Denis Laverty possesses more than 17 years experience in network management and communications, Denis has been involved with network management applications from the early DOS days; as product trainer, technical author and QA Director. In 2003 he co-founded OPENXTRA together with Jack Hughes and serves as its Managing Director.