The loveliest trick of the Devil is to persuade you that he does not exist!” – C. Baudelaire, 1864

In IT, the hardest system issue to solve is the one you don’t know (or won’t admit) you have. I’m not saying that IT professionals willfully ignore or explain away instability. Far from it! We tend to work tirelessly to create environments that are robust, that can survive the greatest reasonable amount of perturbation, and keep delivering consistent services.

Wireless heat maps have gotten a lot of press lately, from SolarWinds and the industry at large. There’s a good reason for this. As wireless devices become faster and gain more users, the completely wireless office space becomes a reality for larger and larger organizations.

If you run a network, you know how complaints start. Lowly users or high-placed executives come to you complaining of lousy bandwidth, applications that freeze mid-transaction, phone calls breaking up, video scrambled, etc. It seems that whatever the cause, it’s your fault. Often, even the most non-technical people have their own ideas about what’s wrong with the health of your network and how to fix it, which might involve switching telecom companies, buying more bandwidth, or swapping out hardware.