We’re pleased to announce some of the winners of our Get Your Network in Shape for 2008 contest.
The first winning New Years Resolution submission was:
Change our network management environment from reactive to proactive. Stop using our customers as our monitoring tools, we should be informing them of problems and not the other way around.
In a network setting, this refers to the idea that by the time the end-user has a problem and has called into the help-desk, it’s too late to do anything about preventing the problem. If this is your strategy, it disrupts workflow – never mind that end-users are often non-technical and may not describe problems in enough detail or accuracy for you to get a handle on the root cause of the problem. Manish Chacko wrote about this in a humorous piece entitled “God help the help desk,” a while back.
It can be difficult to transition from a “firefighting” mindset to a “preventing” or proactive mindset, but the rewards are certainly far greater.
The second winning New Years Resolution submission was:
Get more and faster information about my network LAN and WAN, and implement a Network Operations Center on my site.
No matter what the size of the network or the company, if it’s critical to the business, you have to keep an eye on network application performance. Whether it’s a multi-million dollar NOC center that handles a multinational corporation’s network infrastructure and looks like the NORAD set from “Wargames” or a small program running on an old Gentoo Linux box in the closet that you were originally going to use to scan for aliens, having a central location where you can instantly know the status of your network is one of the key ways to solve network-related problems faster, saving time, money, and ibuprofen.
Congratulations to the winners!
The contest may be over, but if you want to tell us what you think the most important issues of 2008 are, or what you’d like to see from Network Performance Daily in the future, feel free to drop us a line in our comments section.
No comments yet.