As the title says; I’ve got control issues. I want things to work the way they should. When things fail, I want them to fail exactly like I believe they should. I want to know that if my performance down a certain path starts to drop that my network will dynamically choose a better path. Oh, and I want to know in advance what path that will be.

I want to know that if a power supply in one of my core or distribution switches starts to go a little wonky. I want to know BEFORE it causes an outage, not after.

How many network administrators have any proactive monitoring in place. Far too few if my customers are to be taken as a representative sample. It strikes me as a little funny that we have such great tools at our disposal and we just don’t bother to take advantage of them.

From free tools such as OPENNMS and Spiceworks, to older traditional tools such as SolarWinds and Ciscoworks LMS, to newer tools based on modern software architectures like HP’s Intelligent management center. There are a lot of low cost options nowadays for network admins to be able to get a little insight into what’s REALLY happening in their environments.

What about you? Where are you in your network management journey? What tools are you using and what value you do you find in them?