Remember the old management adage "You can only manage what you can measure"? Well, there's a corollary in Network Management, in which you can only manage devices that you know to exist. In my current job, the network has over 600 core network devices (e.g. routers and switches) and in...

How do you monitor the critical components of your infrastructure? Let's say that your core consists of 75 key devices, plus the links that interconnect them. It makes sense to monitor device status as well as the links between them. If each system has three or four links, that means that you have...

"Holy Crap!" exclaimed David from the depths of the cube farm, "We just failed the PCI audit! Check out the email from Tony." Tony is the CIO. David is one of my co-workers, a good friend, and overall smart guy. I turned to my email and checked out the message. Sure enough, the Payment...

It is configuration checking time. Do you know where all your devices are? How do you know that there's not a rogue device lurking in your network? How do you know that the configuration collection mechanism has discovered all the devices in your network? I just finished working on a security assessment...

I recently received a comment from Gerry Gerofsky about IPv6 network discovery: Hi Terry, I am trying to understand how CiscoWorks, OpenView discovers an IPv6 network? In Ipv4, typically a tool like OpenView CiscoWorks, you feed it a subnet and it goes and checks all the IP's. What is available in...