Articles By Sukhdeep Singh

As a network administrator, part of your job is to manage and ensure application availability and performance. While web applications are great for the user and require very little configuration they can cause bandwidth or latency issues that aren’t so great. The reality, however, is that this is a problem that is becoming more common in network management, and there is help out there to guide you.

Flow is an excellent way for network engineers to analyze traffic. Simply put, traffic flow can be best defined as a way to measure traffic that has similar packets. To identify a packet as a certain type of flow, there is data that can be analyzed to separate them into specified categories. A large amount of vendors use NetFlow, which was developed by Cisco; Juniper Networks has J-Flow and sFlow, which is used by Nortel as well as HP among other vendors.

There’s no doubt that IP Address Management can be a major chore, but as any network engineer or administrator knows, procrastination will only make things worse. For those who are still using homegrown applications or spreadsheets to keep track of IP address space, you should know that there are tools out there that can help you stay organized. Check out the “Geek Guide to IP Address Management” on the SolarWinds website in the “Resources” section.There’s also a webcast, “Advanced IP Address Management” from SolarWinds that provides an excellent overview of how to properly manage a network’s IP address space.

Maybe you’re looking to reduce costs, or perhaps you want more ease of use out of your monitoring system’s user interface. If so, this SolarWinds webcast about the fundamentals of network monitoring will be worth your time. A look at Orion Network Performance Monitor, the flagship product of Solar Winds which is easy to use, can work with your existing network components using SNMP and can be set up in less than an hours worth of time.