Just a brief update on the few entries we are working on right now:

1) SEO and website monitoring

2) Review of some internal network monitoring tools

3) New video / presentations on monitoring

4) Adding a third donation target to our current Lance Armstrong Foundation and the March of Dimes donation programs.

Sorry that it’s taking so long to get things up and going, but with the long weekend here and getting back in the work mindset, plus working on several RFP responses for extreme integrated networks, it’s been a bit of of a struggle to sit down and write.

But don’t worry, we’ll be posting a few new articles this week, probably starting this afternoon.

We’ve made some changes to our Free Website Monitoring in the past week, including the Free Ipod Giveaways, but something that I don’t think that I’ve mentioned yet is the change from 60 minute to 15 minute checks.

We tossed this one around for a while and came to the conclusion that while 60 minute checks are good enough to let you know that you’ve been down for up to an hour before you hear anything, it really wasn’t providing the kind of service that made sense, even for our Free Website Monitoring customers.

So we moved from 60 minutes to 15 minutes. Nothing else has really changed, just the shortened intervals. You are still notified of outages via email. You can still monitoring one web server on one domain. And you can still add the link back to www.microNOC.com to add both content monitoring and the chance to win a free ipod shuffle.

Hope everyone is having a great weekend.

As a way to help increase the ability of our customers to relax, microNOC is giving away iPods. Lots of them actually.

Here are three ways that you can get your hands on one:

1) We are giving away an iPod shuffle every month to a website that uses our Free Website Monitoring service. All you need to do be considered eligible is sign up for our Free service with its 15 minute checks of your site and email notification of problems, then place a link back to us on your homepage and let us know about it. We’ll use the link to make sure that your server is actually serving content correctly, and we’ll enter your site into our monthly giveaway. No purchase required for this one.

2) Sign up for our Annual Premium Website Monitoring service here. Every tenth signup (sorry - we are keeping track internally, no public counters) will receive a free iPod Shuffle. Easy, better odds than option 1, but a purchase is required.

3) The last way is the best way. We are giving away an iPod Touch once a quarter to one of our Annual Premium Website Monitoring subscribers. Completely random drawing, And winning the iPod Shuffle for being the tenth site to sign up doesn’t disqualify you from winning this one.

So if you are looking for a free iPod, here is your chance. You can use any or all of the options. And not only do you get a chance to get your hands on an iPod or two, but you get to relax in the knowledge that your website or internet servers are up and running like they are supposed to be.

How could it get any better?

In response to a question asked recently, here is a list of the top 5 free tools that I use when starting out doing consulting in IT departments. These are free tools that are designed for monitoring networks from the inside, as opposed to external monitoring like that provided by microNOC.com.

In no particular order, here are the tools that reach for when starting on an unfamiliar network.

1) MRTG.

This tool is probably the basis for the majority of monitoring tools out there. Used to collect data points and generate graphs, MRTG is one of the best tools for collecting historic data (especially when used with RRDTool on the backend) and generating management and report friendly graphs and web pages.

Like all the tools that I list here, there is a bit of a learning curve with MRTG, but it’s not a steep one and it is a good choice for cutting your teeth on in the monitoring world.

2) Nedi

Nedi is a great tool if you are running a Cisco centric network. Once again a web based tool, Nedi keeps track of what equipment is plugged into which switch on a cisco network. That is a very basic explanation that doesn’t cover half the features available, but it is the first one that makes people reach out to Nedi. While my first use is usually to find machines that are causing issues, that rapidly turns into an inventory collection of the equipment on the network. Nedi pulls as much information as it can from every network device that it finds, gathering things like serial numbers, firmware versions and configurations.

If part of your job will entail managing end user devices, or if it’s just running a network that is having issues, Nedi is a great tool to deploy early to help track down issues.

3) Netflow Tools

If you are monitoring a network of any size, the odds are in your favor that your network routers support Netflow exports, which netflow tools capture and generate truly useful information. While MRTG can easily tell you that a network connection is overloaded, NetFlow will tell you why. A simple explanation of netflow is that it sends a constant stream of information from the router to a collection program. The stream of information includes the source IP address, the destination IP address, the ports or protocols in use and the size of the information in each data flow. No actual contents are captured, just information about the data. That flow of information can be used to create graphs that show what type of traffic is using up all your bandwidth, and also let you know what computer or device is generating or receiving all the traffic. Netflow tools are a necessity for learning about your network and what is going on with it on a day to day, or even hour to hour basis.

4) Nagios

Nagios is the big dog in terms of opensource monitoring frameworks. Used by tons of companies, and as the backend for several commercial offerings, Nagios provides you with a great tool for monitoring various things on your network, include server response, application response, database response and any number of other things. It also does alerting via email and it’s web display, has the ability to handle scheduled alerting (meaning that one person can be contacted during the week, another on the weekend), escalations for unanswered alerts and a decent web interface that includes mapping. It also allows for customization, with the ability to create your own monitoring scripts, or use some of the thousands of monitoring and alerting scripts that people have posted online.

On the downside, it’s not easy to setup. It’s text file based, doesn’t allow for changes without restarts and it can be finicky. However there are several liveCD or easy installation packages out there that include Nagios which make installation and setup a bit easier.

5) NTOP

NTOP is very similar to Netflow in that it watches for data streams and collects traffic information, displaying that info via a web interface. The significant difference is that, in its most basic form and configuration NTOP only watches one interface for that information. While that might not seem very useful at first glance, hooking a system running NTOP up to a network port that is mirroring the traffic of other ports is a quick and simple way to start gathering information about the traffic on your network.

In more advanced configurations, NTOP can be used to collect and display Netflow data, gather data from remote instances of NTOP and several other neat tricks.

All of these tools, plus a few more, are in my collection of tools. I use my toolkit all the time, especially when walking into a new network that I need to work on. I can get a great set of monitoring tools up and running in short order, and start collecting the data that I need to find problems and start working on solutions. And that is the key to success in running a network.

Next up in the tools category are a couple of packages that include several of the tools that I mention in a convenient bite size, easy installation package.

Stay tuned.

Having been in IT for a long time, I am used to monitoring servers and systems. It’s what makes our lives easier. And what lets us sleep at night. It’s also what wakes us up at night.

Monitoring systems are one of the first things that I setup at any company that I’m working at. I do that for a number of reasons, like gaining an understanding of the network and systems, being able to build a baseline for the network and being able to correlate end user complaints with actual system issues. Plus any number of other reasons.

I also use my internal monitoring systems to gather a ton of data. You see, in another life I either build large scale networks or am brought in to fix issues within existing networks and departments. And one of the ways to start to fix things is to determine what is wrong in the first place.

And to figure out what is wrong, you use a series of tools that gather detailed information. Things that the average business owner doesn’t need to know, or wouldn’t want to learn about in the first place. Like ACK error counts, malformed packets, causes of network storms and spanning tree failures. But as someone who has to locate and fix problems, those are the things that I need most.

So I deploy internal monitoring systems that not only alert me to problems, but also allow me to gather information on errors, choke points, server problems and the like.

But at the same time I also setup external monitoring of systems that are exposed to the internet. And not just because of microNOC. I did this before microNOC was around.

The simple explanation for why is that I need to know what our external customers are experiencing, from their perspective. I might know from our internal monitoring systems that the web server is up and running ok and that the firewall that protects it is responding, but what I can’t tell from the internal system is that the firewalls translation engine just failed and that while internal requests are ok, traffic coming from the Internet is failing to make it to the server.

What that means that people on the internet trying to get to our website to buy our products or learn about our company cannot do so. Or possibly email they send can’t make it to our email server. Or even worse, the domain name cannot be resolved.

In the grand scheme of things, those might now seem too bad. But in reality they are a great way to lose customers. Or opportunities. If people can’t get to your site, they might not come back. People are fickle that way. And if inbound RFP email aren’t getting to you, then you could miss out on huge opportunities.

On the bright side having your email server not reachable from the outside world sure does work as an effective spam filter.

So there you have it. Why an IT specialist does internal and external monitoring. And why you should too.

As referenced in the last post, here is a wallet card for you to fill in and keep with you so that you always have the information that you need at hand when there is a problem with your website or network.

ISP Emergency Wallet Card

Print them out, fill them in and keep them handy at all times. And do the same for your backup person.

This week one of the best known web entities in the world, Google, had an outage. That’s right, Google.

From the reports that came out immediately afterwards, the outage was caused by a routing change on their internal networks that led to all traffic being routed through a very small connection, causing it to fail. Actually it didn’t fail, saying that gives of the image of a smoking network cable. A better description would go back to the infamous “pipes” comment - it was like trying to pour all the water that goes over Niagara Falls into a 4 inch drain pipe. The pipe wouldn’t fail, but it also wouldn’t be able to get the job done either because it wasn’t designed to handle that much load.

Google knew about the problem immediately, but it still takes a while to fix. During the time it took to fix the problem, pretty much all of the Google services were offline, everything from Gmail to search. I have no idea how much that outage cost, but I’d be curious to see the numbers if they are ever made available.

Now Google is so large and they run so many datacenters and operations centers around the globe that they had immediate notification of the problem. And you can be sure that they were on the phone to their network providers ASAP (unless it was an internal problem, in which case i bet that their internal guys where catching an earful).

But what if an outage happens to your website or web host? Do you think that you’d know immediately? Would you be able to react quickly enough to minimize the cost of the outage? Do you have the phone number handy for your ISP or web hosting provider? Is there anyone else you need to contact? What happens if you find out about an outage and you aren’t in your office?

There is some basic information that you should carry with you, just in case. Most IT departments have wallet cards with that kind of information printed on them for people to carry, just in case. If they have a larger network they often have the information stored on their phone or some other device they keep with them.

Here is a short list of the information that we recommend you carry:

ISP Name and Phone number
Account Number at ISP
Any password needed to access technical support
Contact info for your backup - IT consultant, web designer, whoever you may need to work on this for you.

Just having that information with you whenever you are notified of an outage will really help you when you are trying to get things back up and under control.

We are in the process of putting together some simple docs that explain what website monitoring is, how to get started, what features to look for and creative ways to use it for your business.

We’ll be posting these in a couple of places online so that everyone can begin to understand what they are possibly missing if they aren’t doing monitoring.

Right now, we only have one document out there - “What exactly is website monitoring?” - but will have several more out over the next couple of days.

We’ll also be adding a couple of new pages to the site, including one for informational videos and another for white papers and informational documents.

Check in shortly for the new pages at www.micronoc.com.

Feel free to distribute them if you need the info.

A quick video showing how simple it is to sign up for free monitoring services at microNOC.com.

I just realized that I hadn’t written anything about this.

We have decided that we will be doing a couple of giveaways. They both involved iPods, and you have multiple chance to win.

First, we are giving an iPod Shuffle to every tenth website that is signed up for our Premium Monitoring Service on an annual basis.

There is no entry, no forms to fill in. We are making this one nice and simple. Every tenth signup via our Premium Monitoring Signup page will be sent an iPod shuffle.

And for the next chance to win, every one website address that has an annual Premium Monitoring subscription will be entered into a quarterly drawing for an iPod Touch. And that includes all the subscribers to annual Premium Monitoring that signed up before this announcement.

So there you go, the opportunity for you to win multiple iPods, combined with the simplest website and domain monitoring service available.

Good Luck!