The Network Monitoring reality check

A few weeks ago, Vallum Software had a reality check. Our website was down for over a day. It was due to a cascading RAID storage failure at our hosting provider. They were able to recover everything, and no data was lost. It was quite an impact to be down for a day.

This got me to thinking about the importance of network monitoring and management. Every organization should be monitoring their network equipment, and especially their critical applications. Unfortunately, there are many organizations that do not. The reasons normally lead back to expensive and complex solutions. Organizations either cannot afford the solutions, and/or they do not have the technical resources to install, use and maintain the solutions.

Hardware and software outages don’t simply happen. They are normally proceeded by signs, and if you’re monitoring for them, you can normally circumvent a downtime event. Waiting for a downtime event to occur is not an option. There is not only the downtime, but there is the time lost attempting to figure out exactly what is wrong. Downtime translates directly to lost revenue.

Think that cloud vendors are immune? Think again. All of the major cloud vendors have had outages. The latest was SalesForce who had an outage that resulted in five hours of data loss. You can read about it here. The point is that cloud vendors, and hosting providers also have exposure to outage events. Just because it’s in the cloud does not make it magically immune to outages. Cloud vendors are not doing anything different that would circumvent downtime. They have access to the very same solutions that organizations have. The only difference is that many of these solutions are outdated and were not designed for cloud environments.

In my opinion, outages point back to network monitoring vendor solutions, and their immaturity. Most vendors continue to employ outdated centralized architectural approaches in their solutions, which contribute to the cost, complexity and inflexibility issues that organizations are facing. Before there is any broad improvement in network monitoring capabilities, there needs to be a concerted move by vendors to move away from outdated architectural approaches. 

I hope this information has been useful to you and as always, I welcome any comments. Please check out Vallum and our partner the GMI-Foundation.

About the Author:

Lance Edelman is a technology professional with 25+ years of experience in enterprise software, security, document management and network management. He is co-founder and CEO at Vallum Software and currently lives in Atlanta, GA.