Tackling distributed management

Monitoring network nodes can be challenging, considering today's geographically distributed networks - never mind expensive. Jim Maas, network monitoring engineer at a medical centre, revealed his experiences integrating multiple network management tools to get an accurate read on service delivery across some 1300 distributed clinic locations. Like Lorion, Maas worries most about patient care and how to improve the network infrastructure to best facilitate that.

"We are geographically distributed, and I have to make sure the network is up so patients are getting the care they need at all times," Maas said. "I monitor to spot systems in trouble before they go down and work to prevent any failure situations."

Maas is also working to include potentially 600 more clinics across the US in his monitoring network. He says he uses CiscoWorks, SolarWinds and the open source application Cacti to better understand how the application is travelling across the net. Cacti gives Maas a picture of bandwidth utilization without increasing his budget, but he was quick to say that IT managers have to carefully consider which products to purchase from vendors versus which products to license from the open source community.

"It's all about time. Vendor products can work more quickly for you out of the box," he said. "Open source requires more time to get it working the way you want in your monitoring network."

Maas said at varying times he has evaluated up to 15 vendor management tools - because of the cost associated with many popular products - to determine if they collect the information he needs to ensure an optimal end user experience. And despite how much information he needs to collect, he also said he understands he can't overload his internal customers with management data. With monitoring tools in place to collect management data from routers, switches, servers, applications and end user devices, Maas said this year he is working to get an "end-to-end representation" of what experience the end user is having.

"The network could be experiencing no problems, but that doesn't mean the application is getting to the user in good time," he said.