MySQL® is one of the most popular relational database management systems being used today. Its popularity with SQL admins who manage data sets puts it at the back end of many tiered…
JMX Monitoring Best Practices
Monitoring Java management extensions (JMX) may seem daunting, but they are completely necessary for application and network management. They connect to remote clients and monitor applications running inside a Java…
4 Steps to Forecast and Plan Your Network Capacity Needs
“Monitoring” is a deceptively broad category, so it’s not surprising that IT professionals often have differing descriptions. Some believe monitoring is the thing that creates tickets in the helpdesk system.…
Server and Application Reliability
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.
Configuring NetFlow v5 and v9 on Cisco Routers
IT pros have access to a range of tools in their monitoring toolbox. There are the humble but readily available command line options like ping, traceroute, and netstat; the versatile SNMP protocol that…
An Introduction to SNMP Basics
Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is a popular technology that lets you monitor network devices such as switches, routers, servers, printers, and other IP-based devices. While most network and systems…
Probabilistic Sampling With A Sketch
In a previous post, I explained that we observe rich and complex streams of events, something like the following multiplied by a million: And our goal is to choose a…
4 Steps to Create a Wireless Heat Map
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.
Bandwidth Problems? 3 Steps to Diagnose Bandwidth Issues
We’ve all been there. You place a lunch order at a restaurant, speak for a while with your dining companions, then someone at the table realizes it’s been a while since you…
Selecting Representative Samples From A Stream Of Queries
Sampling is hard. This is the title of a talk I gave at a meetup in Boston a few weeks back. But what’s so hard about sampling anyway? To begin…