Your clients’ network data is trapped in your vendor’s dashboard It’s the week before a quarterly business review. Your client wants to see uptime by site, the outages you handled and how fast you closed them. The data exists. It’s sitting in your monitoring vendor’s dashboard, in a format you can’t reshape, behind a login
Category: Network security
You Watch the Network Like Hawks. Who’s Watching the Cloud?
You watch the network like hawks. Who’s watching the cloud? This happens in a lot of IT shops. The branch firewall gets polled every 30 seconds. Every switch and access point has thresholds, alerts and an escalation path. Then there’s the production database running in AWS, the app servers in Azure, and the DigitalOcean droplet
Firmware Management: The patching everyone forgets
Firmware Management: The patching everyone forgets “We found out we were three firmware versions behind after the breach, not before.” Most IT teams have a routine for patching laptops and servers. Operating system updates get pushed, endpoint tools report compliance, and someone can tell you roughly where things stand. Firmware is different. The switches, firewalls,
Automated Ticket Creation: Why Your Team Should Never Type an Outage Twice
Automated Ticket Creation: Why your team should never type an outage twice “Everything gets typed twice. Once in monitoring, once in our ticket system.” If that sentence sounds familiar, you are not alone. For most IT teams managing multiple locations, an outage creates two jobs at once: fix the problem, and document the problem. The
Your Cloud Provider Already Told You What’s Wrong. Is Anyone Reading It?
Your Cloud Provider Already Told You What’s Wrong. Is Anyone Reading It? Every major cloud platform ships with a security dashboard. AWS has GuardDuty and Security Hub. Microsoft has Defender for Cloud. These tools are constantly scanning your environment and flagging real problems. The findings are accurate, timely, and almost always ignored. What it costs
Network Diagram Automation: Why Your Visio File Was Only Ever Right Once
Network Diagram Automation: Why Your Visio File Was Only Ever Right Once “Our network diagram was accurate the day the consultant drew it.” Every NOC has one. It’s usually a Visio file, sitting on a shared drive, last touched by someone who doesn’t work there anymore. And every day since it was drawn, it’s gotten
Carrier Ticket Automation: The Fix for the Biggest Cost Your NOC Never Measures
Carrier Ticket Automation: The Fix for the Biggest Cost Your NOC Never Measures “Half a tech’s day disappears into carrier hold music, and nobody can prove it.” If that sentence made you wince, you already know the problem. If it didn’t, that’s exactly why it’s the most expensive line item your NOC has never budgeted
The Monitoring Tool That Needs Its Own IT Project
The Monitoring Tool That Needs Its Own IT Project “We still need on-prem collector servers.” This one doesn’t show up in the sales demo. It shows up a few weeks into deployment, when your team realizes that monitoring your network first requires standing up more infrastructure on that network. LogicMonitor, like several platforms in this
Why Did Adding Three Switches Blow Up Your Monitoring Bill?
Why Did Adding Three Switches Blow Up Your Monitoring Bill? “We went over our device count and got hit with overage fees.” If you run infrastructure across multiple locations, you’ve probably felt this one firsthand. You add a few switches mid-quarter, nothing dramatic, just normal growth. Then the invoice shows up 30 to 50 percent
Your Monitoring Tool Told You It’s Down. Now What?
Your Monitoring Tool Told You It’s Down. Now What? “It tells me something’s down. Then I still have to call the carrier.” If you run IT for a multi-location business, you’ve said some version of this sentence more times than you’d like. SolarWinds, PRTG, Auvik, whatever sits on your NOC screen right now, it’s very