It struck me this morning that one of the few constants in life is the importance of fundamentals. I can well remember my junior high and high school basketball coach drilling the importance of fundamental basketball into our young heads - dribbling, proper shooting technique, passing - he was all about mastering the basics and we practiced them for hours at a time, 6 days per week. It was much the same when my mom dragged me to church on Sundays - learn the fundamentals and they will stay with you throughout your life they told us. So, we focused on memorizing the Ten Commandments...

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A few weeks ago I wrote blog post about some cool technologies including NetFlow and Cisco's IP SLA and provided some information on what IP SLA can be used for and how it works. Since then I've become even more convinced that IP SLA is a must-use technology. I guess you could say I've gone from being just a fan to being somewhat of a fanatic. Sort of like the way I feel about Mountain Dew, spinnerbaits, and bird dogs - I just plain love 'em. Over the last few weeks I've really been able to get my hands dirty with this technology. I hosted a webcast -Deep Dive...

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This Thursday, March 26th, at 10:00 a.m. CDT, we're hosting a new webcast on "Network Troubleshooting - the Top 5 Technologies to Leverage". This webcast is going to be a little different than some of the others as we're going to dive a little deeper into how each technology works vs. focusing on applications the leverage the technology. We'll also cover some of the common concerns that people raise with enabling these technologies on your corporate network. During the webcast we'll take an in-depth look at: Trace route SNMP NetFlow (J-Flow, sFlow, etc)...

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Today several folks here at the SolarWinds offices in Austin TX suggested that I write a blog post on the Conficker virus . This morning that seemed like a pretty good idea, but as the day went on and I started reading all of the great blog posts and articles (check out the ones by Network World and ZDNet ) out there that have been written about this already - there really didn't seem to be anything else to say and it's pretty late to do anything to affect April 1st, so I've decided to write about something else entirely. Last week we did a great webcast on network troubleshooting...

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IP based networks are more complex today than ever before. Not only are they now supporting voice, video, and data, but complications like dwindling IPv4 resources, sprinkles of IPv6, and constant changes in topology can make them seem almost unmanageable. Tactical networks have all of these complexities with the added pressures of needing to be deployed quickly, by a sometimes untrained and ever-changing staff, and with consequences of failure measured in more important things than lost packets… The good news is that there are some best practices that you can adopt when it...

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