SolarWinds acquires Trusted Metrics,

SolarWinds, which supplies IT management software, has acquired Trusted Metrics, a provider of real-time threat monitoring and management software. Financial terms were not disclosed.

SolarWinds said the deal extends its IT management portfolio to include security monitoring. Trusted Metrics' Threat Monitor tool can detect suspicious activity and malware by aggregating asset data, security events, host intrusion detection, network intrusion detection, and correlating that data with continuously updated threat intelligence, identifying the danger signals amidst all the innocent noise of a normal network.

“For nearly 20 years, SolarWinds has focused on helping to address our customers’ everyday IT management challenges—working to make sure that our products are designed to be powerful, yet easy to use, and work the way that technology professionals need them to work. And because we serve such a wide range of technology professionals, we understand the unique challenge that security presents—whether an organization is managing its IT infrastructure directly or working with a managed service provider (MSP),” stated Kevin Thompson, CEO, SolarWinds.

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Blueprint: The Rise of the Network Monitoring Engineer

by Patrick Hubbard, Head Geek, SolarWinds

Today’s network engineers experience tremendous complexity, in part due to increasing demand, but also given the diversity of protocols and the high number of multi-tier applications that are often outside of their control. Combined with improved automated failover it’s become impossible (except in the largest of organizations) for network administrators to be highly specialized, meaning the days of being a router jockey are gone.

Network administrators today are stuck between everyday tasks of change management, hardware refreshes and strategic changes required to support new business initiatives, and the on-demand troubleshooting work they are asked to do. On top of this, automation encourages IT managers to streamline their teams, so as network complexity increases, paradoxically the number of people available to help address these tasks is actually decreasing.

But this doesn’t mean the future of network administration is bleak. There are a number of ways network engineers can improve their skills and remain relevant to their organizations, especially at a time when hybrid IT is taking center stage. According to the most recent SolarWinds IT Trends Report, just nine percent of North American organizations have not migrated at least some infrastructure to the cloud and nearly all IT professionals say adopting cloud technologies is important to their organizations’ long-term business success.

Networking in a Hybrid Environment

In such complex environments, network administrators need the ability to view performance, traffic and configuration details of devices both within and outside their traditional networks. However, hybrid IT means network administrators have much more opacity or outright lack of control over the resources in the cloud that they need to manage and monitor.

Because the end user expectation that IT be able to assure delivery of services is the same for on-premises and cloud, this can be frustrating. It’s exacerbated by cloud service providers who include proprietary monitoring and management tools, but are not vendor-agnostic.  They actually create extra work for administrators who must flip between multiple dashboards without the benefit of holistic views that would allow them to troubleshoot quickly.

Often, such tools also spew alerts without indicating what might be causing the issue. For example, for an application running in the data center, network administrators have visibility into every network layer required to host the hypervisor. However, when that application is moved into the cloud, network administrators lose the administrative authority to be able to easily monitor.  They require a new way to monitor in order to keep the same rich visibility if it were on-premises.

Administrators still need to monitor interface performance, as well as identify service delivery issues as part of the path connecting the service to the end user. New technologies have become available that reveal the physical connectivity of the service components and end uses who might be experiencing poor performance.

So while using disparate vendor-provided tools may be cost-effective in the short term, having a large number of disparate solutions is its own kind of trouble—it doesn’t lend itself to a coherent, integrated alerting and notification strategy that allows administrators to stay on top of performance, ultimately costing time and money in the long term.

The Rise of the Dedicated Monitoring Engineer

Hybrid IT is drawing attention to the need for a new approach to monitoring and management essentials. Enter monitoring as a discipline, which varies from simple monitoring in that it is the defined role of one or more individuals within an organization. A designated monitoring engineer is able to work across systems and environments, thereby removing network and data center silos and gaining the able to turn data points generated by monitoring tools into actionable insights for the business.

Hiring a monitoring engineer or better yet, a team of monitoring engineers, should be considered a critical investment in services and business success. It’s one thing to say that companies need a certain headcount in order to maintain a business and keep the lights on, but another thing entirely when it comes to IT, which is largely viewed as a cost center, and every year most departments are exceeding budgets. However, enlightened companies are beginning to view monitoring as a cost-effective way to achieve greater IT ROI. Instead of purchasing ad hoc tools to keep an eye on their technology, progressive companies have figured out a way to bring discipline and structure to their monitoring practices via staffing and resources. For the right organization, this would be a team of monitoring engineers each with their own specialization—network monitoring, systems monitoring, etc.—but who work in lockstep from a “single point of truth” when it comes to overall infrastructure performance.

How to Make the Business Case for a Monitoring Engineer

With accelerating IT complexity in mind, it’s important that IT management begin to instill monitoring as a discipline principles within the business. IT professionals are already strapped for time and resources, and management needs to step in to help evangelize internally, offer examples and best practices and put budget for new tools and technologies behind these efforts in order to achieve the full benefit of monitoring as a discipline. Management must make a strong business case that the monitoring engineer or engineers will achieve ROI for not only the IT department, but the organization as a whole.

Critical Monitoring Engineer Skills

Although monitoring engineers must possess basic network engineering skills, there are a few particular skillsets in addition that are necessary to be truly successful in the role. These include:

• A programmer’s eye towards customization and a willingness to improve – Often, we buy technology that’s custom-made and use it right out of the box. But the most successful monitoring engineer will turn their eye towards improving it all the time.
• An analyst’s eye for data – Instead of simply poring over endless numbers in a spreadsheet, a monitoring engineer should be able to take a step back, look at the bigger picture and ask themselves what their “customers” will be using their monitoring reports for and how they should be visualized. And they must remember, less is more. 
• On top of cultivating their skills with experience, studying is key – The best way to hone skills is to learn on the fly, as well as spend more than a few lunch breaks and evenings testing new technologies and processes in a lab environment. 

Our networks are growing in complexity as they become further tied to all elements of the IT environment, extending all the way to cloud. IT management should seize this opportunity to return as much value as possible out of existing technology by hiring a monitoring engineer or a monitoring team with at least one individual focused on the network that works in tandem with existing teams to holistically monitor the performance of the entire IT infrastructure.  Whether on-premises or in the cloud, these resources maintain an eye towards improving existing systems, delivering promised ROI and driving repeatable progress for the business.

About the Author

Patrick Hubbard is a head geek and senior technical product marketing manager at SolarWinds. With 20 years of technical expertise and IT customer perspective, his networking management experience includes work with campus, data center, storage networks, VoIP and virtualization, with a focus on application and service delivery in both Fortune 500 companies and startups in high tech, transportation, financial services and telecom industries.

About SolarWinds

SolarWinds (NYSE: SWI) provides powerful and affordable hybrid IT infrastructure management software to customers worldwide from Fortune 500® enterprises to small businesses, government agencies and educational institutions. We are committed to focusing exclusively on IT Pros, and strive to eliminate the complexity that they have been forced to accept from traditional enterprise software vendors. Regardless of where the IT asset or user sits, SolarWinds delivers products that are easy to find, buy, use, maintain and scale while providing the power to address all key areas of the infrastructure from on premises to the cloud. Our solutions are rooted in our deep connection to our user base, which interacts in our thwack online community to solve problems, share technology and best practices, and directly participate in our product development process. Learn more today at www.solarwinds.com.

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Blueprint: The Evolution of the Network

by Leon Adato, Head Geek, SolarWinds

Learn from the past, live in the present and prepare for the future.

While this may sound like it belongs hanging on a high school guidance counselor’s wall, they are words to live by, especially in IT. They apply perhaps to no other infrastructure element better than the network. After all, the network has long been a foundational building block of IT, it’s even more important today than it was in the days of SAGE and ARPANET, and its importance will only continue to grow in the future while simultaneously becoming more complex.

For those of us charged with maintaining the network, it’s valuable to take a step back and examine the evolution of the network. Doing so helps us take an inventory of lessons learned—or the lessons we should have learned; determine what today’s essentials of monitoring and managing networks are; and finally, turn an eye to the future to begin preparing now for what’s on the horizon.

Learn from the Past

Think back to the time before the luxuries of Wi-Fi and the proliferation of virtualization, and before today’s wireless and cloud computing.

The network used to be defined by a mostly wired, physical entity controlled by routers and switches. Business connections were based on T1 and ISDN, and Internet connectivity was always backhauled through the data center. Each network device was a piece of company-owned hardware, and applications operated on well-defined ports and protocols. VoIP was used infrequently, and anywhere connectivity—if even a thing—was provided by the low-quality bandwidth of cell-based Internet access.

With this yesteryear in mind, consider the following lessons we all (should) have learned that still apply today:

It Has to Work
Where better to start than with a throw back to IEEE RFC1925, “The Twelve Networking Truths”? It’s just as true today as it was in 1996—if your network doesn’t actually work, then all the fancy hardware is for naught. Anything that impacts the ability of your network to work should be suspect.

The Shortest Distance Between Two Points is Still a Straight Line
Wired or wireless and MPLS, EIGRP or OSPF, your job as a network engineer is still fundamentally to create the conditions where the distance between the provider of information, usually a server, and the consumer of that information, usually a PC, is as near to a straight line as possible. When you forget that but still get caught up in quality of service maps, automated functions and fault-tolerance, you’ve lost your way.

An Unconfigured Switch is Better than the Wizard
It was a long-standing truth that running the configuration wizard on a switch was the fastest way to break it, whereas just unboxing and plugging it in would work fine. Wizards are a fantastic convenience and come in all forms, but if you don’t know what the wizard is making convenient, you are heading for trouble.

What is Not Explicitly Permitted is Forbidden
No, this policy it’s not fun and it won’t make you popular. And it will actually create work for you on an ongoing basis. But there is honestly no other way to run your network. If espousing this policy will get you fired, then the truth is you’re going to get fired one way or the other. You might as well be able to pack your self-respect and professional ethics into the box along with your potted fern and stapler when the shoe drops. Because otherwise that huge security breach is on you.

Live in the Present 

Now let’s fast forward and consider the network of present day.

Wireless is becoming ubiquitous—it’s even overtaking wired networks in many instances—and the number of devices wirelessly connecting to the network is exploding (think Internet of Things). It doesn’t end there, though—networks are growing in all directions. Some network devices are even virtualized, resulting in a complex amalgam of the physical, the virtual and the Internet. Business connections are DSL/cable and Ethernet services, and increased use of cloud services is stretching Internet capacity at remote sites, not to mention opening security and policy issues since it’s not all backhauled through the data center. BYOD, BYOA, tablets and smartphones are prevalent are creating bandwidth capacity and security issues. Application visibility based on port and protocol is largely impossible due to applications tunneling via HTTP/HTTPS. VOIP is common, also imposing higher demands on network bandwidth, and LTE provides high-quality anywhere connectivity.

Are you nostalgic for the days of networking yore yet? The complexity of today’s networking environment underscores that while lessons of the past are still important, a new set of network monitoring and management essentials is necessary to meet the challenges of today’s network administration head on. These new essentials include:

Network Mapping
While perhaps a bit back-to-basics and also suitable as a lesson we all should have learned by now, when you consider the complexity of today’s networks and network traffic, network mapping and the subsequent understanding of management and monitoring needs has never been more essential than it is today. Moving ahead without a plan—without knowing the reality on the ground—is a sure way to make the wrong choices in terms of network monitoring based on assumptions and guesswork.

Wireless Management
The growth of wireless networks presents new problems, such as ensuring adequate signal strength and that the proliferation of devices and their physical mobility—potentially hundreds of thousands of network-connected devices, few of which are stationary and many of which may not be owned by the company (BYOD)—doesn’t get out of hand. What’s needed are tools such as wireless heat maps, user device tracking, over-subscribed access points and tracking and managing device IP addresses.

Application Firewalls
When it comes to surviving the Internet of Things, you first must understand that all of the “things” connect to the cloud. Because they’re not coordinating with a controller on the LAN, each device incurs a full conversation load, burdening the WAN and every element in a network. And worse, many of these devices prefer IPv6, meaning you’ll have more pressure to dual-stack all of those components. Application firewalls can untangle device conversations, get IP address management under control and help prepare for IPv6. They can also classify and segment device traffic; implement effective quality of service to ensure that critical business traffic has headroom; and of course, monitor flow.

Capacity Planning
Nobody plans for not growing; it’s just that sometimes infrastructure doesn’t read the plan we’ve so carefully laid out. You need to integrate capacity for forecasting tools, configuration management and web-based reporting to be able to predict scale and growth. There’s the oft-quoted statistic that 70 percent of network outages come from unexpected network configuration changes. Admins have to avoid the Jurassic Park effect—unexpected, but what in hindsight were clearly predictable outages is the bane of any IT manager’s existence. “How did we not know and respond to this?” is a question nobody wants to have to answer.

Application Performance Insight
Many network engineers have complained that the network would be stable if it weren’t for the end users. While it’s an amusing thought, it ignores the universal truth of IT—everything we do is because of and for end-users. The whole point of having a network is to run the business applications end-users need to do their jobs on. Face it, applications are king. Technologies such as deep packet inspection, or packet-level analysis, can help you ensure the network is not the source of application performance problems.

Prepare for the Future

Now that we’ve covered the evolution of the network from past to present—and identified lessons we can learn from the network of yesterday and what the new essentials of monitoring and managing today’s network are—we can prepare for the future. So, stay tuned for part two in this series to explore what the future holds for the evolution of the network.

About the Author 

 Leon Adato is a Head Geek and technical evangelist at SolarWinds, and is a Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA), MCSE and SolarWinds Certified Professional (he was once a customer, after all). Before he was a SolarWinds Head Geek, Adato was a SolarWinds® user for over a decade. His expertise in IT began in 1989 and has led him through roles as a classroom instructor, courseware designer, desktop support tech, server support engineer, and software distribution expert. His career includes key roles at Rockwell Automation®, Nestle, PNC, and CardinalHealth providing server standardization, support, and network management and monitoring.

About SolarWinds 
SolarWinds (NYSE: SWI) provides powerful and affordable IT management software to customers worldwide from Fortune 500® enterprises to small businesses. In all of our market areas, our approach is consistent. We focus exclusively on IT Pros and strive to eliminate the complexity that they have been forced to accept from traditional enterprise software vendors. http://www.solarwinds.com/

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