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...

Read Entire Post »

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...

Read Entire Post »

This week I went to the Alamo Drafthouse theatre here in Austin and saw the new film " I Love You, Man " with Jason Segel and Paul Rudd. It was quite an experience. First, they served some great food and wine (I'm not much of a beer drinker), then I got to watch the new Star Trek trailer, and then, once the tears has dried from my eyes (yes, I get that emotinal about a good sci-fi film) I laughed 'till it hurt. It was a really, really good time. Afterwards though, I started thinking about some of the more serious messages in the film and the value of having a support...

Read Entire Post »

Recently I've had a several people ask me for advice on getting started with managing their networks and so I thought I'd take a few minutes tonight to shed some light on the subject... Now, this might seem like an odd topic as many of us have been neck deep in network management since we were knee-high to a grasshopper, but when you think about it we may have actually only been through the process of "getting started" a few times, once, or never at all. Often times we're brought in as part of an existing team where there's an ongoing network management...

Read Entire Post »

I was asked a question today about how Orion's Universal Device Poller (UnDP) works within a large, multi-poller environment. Usually I try to keep these blog entries somewhat product agnostic but this is a question I've been asked a lot and that a lot of you may encounter so I thought I'd spend a few minutes explaining. First off, let's setup the environment. In the scenario we're talking about you've got a main Orion server and because of the number of devices that need to be managed you've also deployed two Orion Additional Polling Engines. As you know...

Read Entire Post »