LoveMyTool - Open Community for Network Management and Monitoring

OSTU: Examining A File Copy Comparison (by Tony Fortunato)

2010-02-05T09:22:02-08:00

Instructor Profile - Tony Fortunato is a Senior Network Specialist with experience in design, implementation, and troubleshooting of LAN/WAN/Wireless networks, desktops and servers since 1989. His background in financial networks includes design and implementation of trading floor networks. Tony has taught at local high schools, Colleges/Universities, Networld/Interop and many onsite private classroom settings to thousands of analysts. Tony is an authorized and certified Fluke Networks and Wireshark Instructor. His Pine Mountain Group CNA Level I and II certification demonstrates his vendor neutral approach to network design, support and implementations. Tony has architected, installed and supported various types of Residential Wireless High Speed as well as hundreds of WIFI hotspots. Tony uses a variety of technologies from Powerline, Wireless and wired technologies to find the most cost-efficient and reliable solution for his customers. Tony combines custom programs, open source and commercial software to ensure a simple support infrastructure.

Tony walks you through the basics of starting an application baseline or comparison.

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Free Tool and Free Tips for Network Configuration Management (by Josh Stephens)

2010-02-04T11:24:55-08:00

Author Profile - Josh Stephens is the Head Geek and VP of technology at SolarWinds, a leading provider of network management software based in Austin Texas. Josh has extensive experience in network management systems, network engineering, and software development. His 15-plus years of experience in technology include designing and deploying advanced networks and network management systems within organizations including the US Air Force, Sprint, MCI/UUNET, and WalMart. He has received several industry certifications including those from Cisco Systems, Microsoft, and HP.

Opening – by Tim O’Neill - I am always on the lookout for cool tools for the Lovemytool readers, especially when they are FREE!

I had recently received an announcement of this new tool that could save you some of your valuable time. Plus as I get older I realize that one simply cannot remember everything including Configurations and I HATE Scripting ... It seems to me that as advanced as we are, everything should be visualized and controlled by simple, traceable, change management focused, safe and secure GUI’s. Well, that is not the case so here is a sweet tool to help every one of you command config people save some time and burning up those “little grey cells”!

I remember meeting the Younce brothers at Walmart when I was with the original Network General Team as the CTM – That is “Chief Trouble Maker”. Then they started Solarwinds and WOW has it come far and done well. I had used their very cool and advanced Engineering Tools for years, until I lost my license.

Well back to the subject - Check out this new Free Tool and look over their exciting Orion technology. I have often wondered why companies do not give away more solutions to prove that their Technology is the best and that they want to be part of THE SOLUTION?

Many Thanks to SolarWinds and Josh –

I wish you less Stress and More Success - Oldcommguy

Josh Stephens was kind enough to write some tips and the following description of the New Free Tool -

Engineers spend a fair amount of time manually typing in command line interface (CLI) commands to configure network devices. Common tasks like configuring VLANs and enabling NetFlow require them to develop detailed scripts specific to their environment. While this is not a difficult task, the command can be easily forgotten and is a pain to rebuild. It’s just one of those “there’s got to be a better way” tasks. Network engineers are already a time-pressed bunch, so despite our love for all things CLI, SolarWinds took a look at the problem and came up with a solution.

We built a free tool called Network Config Generator to allow engineers to create network configuration change templates that they can apply to any CLI-based network device. With Network Config Generator, network engineers can create a change template to re-use for future configurations, saving time and frustration as well as ensuring consistency in configurations across devices. They can download new change templates created by the community and share their own, all without leaving the tool.

One common example is configuring NetFlow on a Cisco ASA. While this is a standard configuration change, there are a few variables that change depending on your environment. Here’s a quick walkthrough of how you might configure this change using our new free tool:

Download and install a free copy of SolarWinds Network Config Generator.
For additional content that SolarWinds’ community members have already created, visit www.thwack.com. As a thwack member, config change templates can be automatically imported and exported directly from the tool.
The config change template for enabling NetFlow on Cisco ASA devices is already included out of the box.
The tool will prompt you for a few inputs specific to your environment, such as the target device’s IP address and community string as well as your NetFlow collector’s IP address and export port.
Network Config Generator will automatically generate a config specific to your environment that enables NetFlow on the Cisco ASA that you specified. Simply copy and paste the output config into your favorite CLI client to execute the change and enable NetFlow on your Cisco ASA device.
Check out the following video explaining the process:

For novice users, Network Config Generator simplifies advanced configuration change tasks by leveraging community-generated templates in a step-by-step GUI. These users can quickly enable advanced network device features, configure VLANs and change interface descriptions with just a few clicks of the mouse. We hope that some of the more advanced users will continue to create and share more templates to help the junior community.

For advanced users, this is a great tool to build a few common templates that you can save and execute on specific devices. The tool also works with SolarWinds Orion Network Configuration Manager (NCM) if you want to execute changes on multiple devices simultaneously.

Happy Config Generating,

Using Event-Driven Analytics to Improve Knowledge Workers' Processes (by Mike Darrish)

2010-02-03T14:53:08-08:00

Author Profile - Mike Darrish is a certified Lean Six Sigma Black Belt and Industry Specialist at OpenConnect Systems, where he works on teams delivering process improvement in large enterprises. Prior to OpenConnect, Mike worked for over 25 years in large enterprises and startups providing IP connectivity, network management, IT performance improvement and financial services. His roles have included programmer, systems administrator, network analyst, instructor, technical and management consultant, and a variety of sales support and sales management positions. Mike lives in the Atlanta, GA area.

World class methodologies such as Lean and Six Sigma are well known, proven approaches to process improvement in the manufacturing sector of the US economy. As a result, according to the US government's Bureau of Labor Statistics, manufacturing productivity doubled between 1987 and 2007. Since these methodologies were adopted much later in the services sector, productivity there increased only 22% in the same time period. See Figure 1.

Figure 1 - BLS Productivity by Sector index 1987=100

One area of process improvement, for knowledge workers, used here to mean people using networked computers and other digital systems, performing financial services activities, customer support, IT services and the like, has been a particularly intractable problem. In the past, a common approach to improving these processes has been to send consultants out with clipboards and stopwatches, stand behind the user and record activities, timing and process data, and then, back in the office, to draw a process map, perhaps capturing and printing out a few screen shots for process documentation. There are a number of problems with this approach. First, users at a work station behave differently when they are actively being watched. While watched, these workers tend to be more productive and typically don't engage in personal activities like surfing the web or chatting with co-workers like they might otherwise do. Then, when the observation period is over, they generally lapse back to normal behavior. This phenomenon, which presents an inaccurate view of the normal process, is called the Hawthorne effect, after a landmark productivity study conducted at the Cicero, Illinois Western Electric Hawthorne plant in the 1920's. Second, and more importantly, the amount of data observers can gather is a tiny fraction of the total computer and network-based activity that goes on in a large enterprise, leading to an inaccurate process model, lacking the details necessary for process improvement with the well known approaches mentioned above.

In recent years, several vendors in the Business Process Management space have used software to collect data from applications and networks as a more robust input to process mapping. Inputs have typically been extracts of database or other enterprise application logs. This approach is more accurate and more scalable than human based observation, but is dependent on the quality of the logs, which are generally not very granular and have the disadvantage of not having user screen captures for detailed analysis of user behavior. Additionally, each application has its own log format and content, making for a difficult data collection and analysis task.

Achieving breakthrough levels of process improvement requires both very granular and scalable data collection and storage as well as world class process improvement methodologies. While collecting process data, one must also avoid materially changing the performance characteristics of the process under study and the enterprise infrastructure. Typically it is not feasible to ask an IT department to retrofit applications with performance metrics and reporting. Ideally, then, one would use passive network taps and/or switch or router based constructs like Cisco VACL Capture or mirror ports. These collection points are realtively inexpensive, non-invasive and, for a single process under study, even in the largest enterprises, can generally can be collocated near the server farm in a small number data centers. Given government regulations such as HIPAA security, and the need to protect financial transactions, the system must encrypt the collected data in place and in real time. In large enterprises, such as healthcare insurance companies, which process upwards of 100 million claims per year, there are several gigabytes per second of data to manage, requiring powerful servers and fast storage. There is also one broad case where traffic across the network, unlike web oriented applications or the still-common dumb terminal emulation, does not accurately reflect the user's behavior. That is the fat client, where an application on a PC does significant work. For fat client applications, a distributed agent with a small footprint and a low reporting traffic rate can generally capture screen shots and field changes, forwarding the information to a central server for storage and later analysis. This approach has proven economical even in VPN-based home office workers, thanks to the widespread availability of broadband data services in most homes.

As we know from Lean and Six Sigma, in order to improve the process, one must measure its key performance indicators (KPIs), including items like user think time, system time, key data inputs and granular transformation procedures. The data that is collected as described above is the key input to a business process discovery. Once we discover and analyze the process sufficiently, we generally have sufficient information to do root cause analysis of problems, hypothesize the changes needed to improve the process, do experiments to better understand the main factors and their interactions and to measure changes to the process as we make them. Since we now have powerful computers at our disposal, it is possible to automatically map the collected data into a business process along with timestamps, userids and other user interactions, as shown in Figure 2. Having large volumes (empirical) data available, rather than the usual anecdotal data and estimates regarding the process, gives us the ability to analyze it scientifically, to graph metrics like end user response time, identify paths users took through the process, analyze the status of key indicators at various times and places in the process, whether straight-through, as we we'd like, or rather, down exception paths. We can also analyze how often and why the long tails of exceptions take place, then relate user and process behavior back to business rules for improvements.

Figure 2- Process Map and Analysis

Process metrics don't just materialize and processes have no pre-existing context, unless they were originally imbued with BPMN or similar metadata. In 2010, the vast majority of processes in use were built before BPM standards gained traction, so it is necessary for business subject matter experts to label the discovered activities (applications) with names that reflect what they are called in everyday usage. The discovery engine can then generate meaningful event-based intelligence from transitions occurring in the monitored business process.

One approach to generating business events is commonly called screen scraping, though in reality it is a fairly sophisticated form of data analysis in its own right. One must be able to analyze the data moving between client and server, whether that data is from dumb terminals, web servers or whatever traverses the network. Then one must render the data in the same way that the target machines do, in order to recreate what the user saw and how he responded. See Figure 3 for an example of this kind of data analysis, recreating the user's experience for the business analyst and providing information needed for the second use of the original data, an analysis of user and system behavior. An additional requirement for breakthrough improvement is the need to analyze and report on process data without the restrictions of traditional Business Intelligence systems with pre-defined schema, event summarization and the subsequent restrictions on analysis and reporting. In the real world, these concepts and methods have been embodied in commercial, off the shelf software and put to use in healthcare insurance companies, improving processes like claims operations, as well as in banks to improve call center operations. By discovering and analyzing process intelligence, workforce intelligence and customer intelligence, enterprises save millions of dollars annually through identification and elimination of defects and waste, especially work in progress. Often, these enterprises write robots to automate some or all of the work previously done by humans, speeding up the process and freeing people up to do more sophisticated tasks and improving customer satisfaction.

Figure 3 - Recreating a User Session

About Comprehend and OpenConnect Systems

For more information about product improvement for knowledge workers, the reader is invited to visit the web site of the author's employer, OpenConnect Systems, to read about Comprehend, a product suite which implements the concepts described above and from which the screen shots are excerpted. OpenConnect Systems, based in Dallas, TX, delivers software and service based solutions focused on improving knowledge workers' business processes.

Top Network Trends in 2010 (by Stephen Brown)

2010-02-01T09:49:25-08:00

Author Profile - Network Instruments provides in-depth network intelligence and continuous network availability through innovative analysis solutions. Enterprise network professionals depend on Network Instruments’ Observer product line for unparalleled network visibility to efficiently solve network problems and manage deployments. By combining a powerful management console with high-performance analysis appliances, Observer simplifies problem resolution and optimizes network and application performance. The company continues to lead the industry in ROI with its advanced Distributed Network Analysis (NI-DNA™) architecture, which successfully integrates comprehensive analysis functionality across heterogeneous networks through a single monitoring interface. Network Instruments is headquartered in Minneapolis with sales offices worldwide and distributors in over 50 countries.

Stephen Brown is the Product Marketing Manager for network analysis vendor Network Instruments with nearly a decade of experience in network management and security. Areas of interest include data loss prevention, network compliance, and VoIP management. Stephen is a member of InfraGard and graduated with a degree in Marketing from the University of Iowa.

A few weeks after the holidays seemed like a good time to look forward to a new year in network management. Gazing into my crystal ball, here are the trends that we see on the rise or meeting their demise in 2010. Rather the discussing obvious trends of increased server virtualization and cloud-based technologies, I tried to go out on a bit of a limb. It'd be great to hear what you think of my predictions – right on the mark or have I been drinking too much eggnog.

On the Rise

Virtualization Shifts to the Desktop

In a year where network teams are looking to save time and money managing users, extending virtualization out to the user desktop just makes sense. The increased use of mobile devices for both business and personal use also drives network teams to consider virtual desktops as an easy way to secure and manage access to company data and applications.

Video over IP Comes of Age

A perfect storm is developing to push the adoption of video conferencing into the corporate mainstream. Larger teleconferencing video vendors including Cisco and Polycom are offering video conferencing packages at all price points. The rough economy is forcing companies to rethink the way employees collaborate and identify alternatives to air travel. Additionally, increases in network bandwidth capacity and comfort with VoIP now have network teams looking to video.

Truly Unified Platforms

Over the past few years Unified Communications has evolved from a concept into a true communications management platform. Rather than a disparate group of programs, companies including Microsoft and Cisco, are offering single platforms incorporating everything from VoIP to video conferencing and instant messaging. Adoption of these platforms will increase as businesses continue to find cost-effective forms of collaboration.

WAN Acceleration

Over the past two years WAN accelerators have grown at an amazing pace. In 2010, the adoption of WAN accelerators will continue to grow. The devices have an immediate ROI for many companies and are easy to implement. With increased server consolidation and more users working remotely, the need for acceleration will also increase.

Rebirth of Monitoring and Analysis

Rather than rip and replace, companies are looking to optimize what they have. IT organizations are increasingly realizing that monitoring is instrumental for maximizing existing infrastructure and network performance. Network teams are also looking to consolidate multiple monitoring tools into a single platform.

Netbooks Break Into Enterprise

Small, light and intelligent, netbooks provide a flexible and portable form factor perfectly-sized for mobile business or remote troubleshooting. Coupled with an attractive price point and an increasingly mobile workforce using more web-based applications, netbooks could be poised to be a realistic choice for business.

Operating Systems: A Third Way?

During the reign of Vista many organizations have grown weary of Windows. While they might be tempted by Mac, costs are always an issue. This might leave an opening for a third OS player. Several strong Linux variants have made moves on the server side, but lack marketing champions to migrate to the desktop. All of this coupled with rumors of the Google Chrome OS will make for an interesting new year and a strong chance of an emerging market-viable third OS.

On the Demise

Death of Traditional WAN

This trend has been a long time coming, but traditional WAN technologies are clearly on their way out. While organizations may have a DS3 line providing WAN service, it's more likely the provider offers an Ethernet link throttled back to the equivalent of DS3 speed. As companies migrate to MPLS and Ethernet, it's becoming a rare day when one can actually see a T1 or D3.

IT Vocab Past Its Prime

While we don't have any control in the use of IT jargon used by the rest of the world, here are some choice words that have been overused or too broadly defined to the point of being useless:

Web 2.0 – This term should have faded a couple years ago with its older brother the Information Superhighway, but sadly it's still here today.

Cloud Computing – The umbrella, catch-all phrase for internet-based computing means so many things that the term has been rendered meaningless.

<Insert Product Here>-Killer – iPhone-Killer, Windows 7-Killer. Naming a product a “killer” is the sure fire way to bury it. Zune, Segway, Windows Vista were suffocated by the weight of their hype and failed to deliver on marketing promises.

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Let Me Be Perfectly Clear: Job Prospects in 2010 (by Paul W. Smith)

2010-01-31T19:20:43-08:00

Author Profile - Paul W. Smith, a Founder and Director of Engineering with INVENTtPM LLc, has more than 35 years of experience in research and advanced product development.

Prior to founding INVENTtPM, Dr. Smith spent 10 years with Seagate Technology in Longmont, Colorado. At Seagate, Dr. Smith was primarily responsible for evaluating new data storage technologies under development throughout the company, and utilizing six-sigma processes to stage them for implementation in early engineering models. While at Seagate, he was a proud member of the team that brought the world’s first notebook disk drive with perpendicular recording technology to the market.

Dr. Smith holds a doctorate in Applied Mechanics from the California Institute of Technology, a Master of Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara and a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

If you think your boss (assuming you still have one these days) is a micro-manager who constantly has you under the microscope, you can probably summon up some empathy for President Obama. One of the most visible “new hires” of these trying economic times, he survived a strenuous interview process to land a prime position, relocation and benefits included.

Politics aside, Obama began his new job in an unprecedented time, bringing his charisma and promise of change to an American people who were hammered by looming bank failures, double-digit unemployment, and the escalating expense, in dollars and lives, of at least two overseas wars. It comes as no surprise that the clothes he (or his wife) wears, the amount of grey on his temples, the wrinkle-count of his face, the words he utters, and even the status of his jump-shot are chronicled daily in great detail.

Analysts with sophisticated computer software and nothing better to do have discovered that Obama’s favorite phrase is “Let me be perfectly clear.”

Even ordinary citizens follow certain rhetorical patterns; we all know someone who prefaces every third sentence with “To be honest …”, leading us to assume that statements lacking this lead are untrue. Another strong contender for most-used might be “You know what I mean?”, somehow implying that the listener may be a bit slow.

The President consistently uses his own signature phrase to season public statements on nearly every topic, from health insurance to the Nobel Peace Prize. At first glance, this seems a bit unusual in politics, a profession where ambiguity is a treasured skill. Is the President merely punctuating his rhetoric according to a comfortable habit, or is he actually launching a campaign – in defiance of all political traditions – against ambiguity?

Each of us has his own mental associations with the word “clarity”; one of mine is filed in the gray-matter with the tab “Sternberg’s Desk”. Eli Sternberg was my professor of Elasticity Theory at Caltech, and a member of the “Gang of Five” who held my doctoral aspirations in his grasp. He was a tall man with a measured, melodious voice – both imposing and inviting – a brilliant scholar with that rare talent that enabled him to craft customized explanations of the most difficult mathematical topics for any student bold enough to engage him. The examinations in his graduate courses were oral, conducted in an empty classroom with the petrified student standing at the blackboard armed only with a piece of chalk, and Prof. Sternberg seated casually in the front row. He was a memorable part of my graduate education, and the image that lingers most is the desk in his immaculate office.

College professors, as a rule, are not known for the neatness of their desks. The working explanation involves the highly active nature of the brilliant mind, mostly incapable of dealing with such trivia as matching socks, timely appearance at appointments, or organizing an office. Prof. Sternberg was a rare exception. The books on his shelves were neatly arranged according to size and color, and his large wooden desk was completely barren save for a single note pad, centered and squared with the edges.

Parallel to the edge of the pad, and displaced slightly to the left, lay his fountain pen. To this day, I am in awe of people who do complex mathematics with a pen. Prof. Sternberg’s professional environment, like his amazing mind, was crisp, clutter free and economical. In my personal dictionary, the word “clarity” sits next to a picture of Eli Sternberg behind his perfect desk.

While clarity may be a defining trait for great minds and an oratorical refrain for our nation’s leader, it is not a noun well-suited to our experience of this past year. As a nation that loves to set anchor with a solid statistic, we have struggled to find one that offers encouragement. Seen through the corrective lens of government analysis, the unemployment figures, hovering around 10% , can be spun optimistically (9 out of every 10 people have jobs), or viewed as a historically dangerous peak by those standing in line at the Department of Labor.

Another measure of unemployment lurks in the shadows; it is known as “U-6” and it attempts to include “discouraged” workers (who isn’t discouraged these days?). Studies show that one in three unemployed people have been looking for a job for more than six months and still haven’t found one. Depending on how you measure discouragement, at least one unemployment index soars to an astounding 20+%.

One thing I’ve learned in this past year is that it’s far too easy to rely on the future as an escape hatch for the present. A foggy, softly focused view of tomorrow separates the optimists from the pessimists, and leads me back down the path toward the denial phase of my journey. The beauty of “standard” government statistical figures is the rich variety from which we can select one that supports our own imaginative pretense. The dictionary will cite “ambiguity” as the antonym for “clarity”, but a choice more relevant to the times might be “apathy”. Like the apathetic contributors to the “true” unemployment figures, those who have lost their clarity for the future will find that their drive to get there will also soon vanish.

The President has launched enough jump shots to know that clarity and focus are also important on the court. In basketball as in other sports, body mechanics rule and successful athletes seek to isolate the preciseness of muscle memory from the competing arguments of intellect and emotion. Just as over-analysis of the process of shooting a basketball will ruin the shot, so does my mental number crunching of 2010 job projections submerge me in murky waters.

Emotional torpedoes threaten to breach the resolve of players and job-seekers alike, flooding each with hormones which beg for release. A flood of adrenaline conveniently equips us to run out of the gym after missing a critical shot. This is generally not a good choice, any more than running away (mentally or physically) from the fears of the job market.

The story of 2009 has taught me this. As I stop wrestling with and cross-checking the government statistics, take control of the fears which try to derail me, and trust my 35 years of muscle-memory-like experience as a technical professional, the clarity – and excitement – of my future is returning.

-Paul

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