How Do You Really Know What Is Going On In Your Network Infrastructure?
Summary: In this Tech Tuesday episode, Dave and Steve talk about network monitoring, and how you can find out what’s really going on in your network, from bad ports and cables, to firewalls and switches.
Mike: Steve Ripper, Dave Hodgdon from Portsmouth Computer Group with convenient locations in Portsmouth and Dover and now open in Manchester and Portland. Man, you guys are just expanding, Dave.
Dave Hodgdon: It’s good stuff.
Steve Ripper: Good morning Mike.
Mike: So let’s talk a little bit about our topic today for Tech Tuesday, because I always find them very fascinating. Today’s topic is “how do you really know what is going on in your network infrastructure – network monitoring”. These will be devices like your switches, your firewall, wireless UPS and more. So Steve, what are we talking about? Network infrastructure. Where do I find network infrastructure? I talk about infrastructure. I’m talking about highways, roads and bridges. What are we talking about? Network infrastructure.
Network Infrastructure
Steve: That’s a pretty good analogy because that is what we’re talking about when you’re talking about roads, all the things that connect your houses and companies and everything. So same thing, network infrastructure. The wiring through the building, the switches that bring everything together. So every PC has a wire that comes out of the back of it.
Mike: Yep.
Steve: It goes somewhere; it goes to a switch. The switch brings all those together. Firewall – doorway to your network, right? How you get out, how people can’t get in. Switches, firewalls, wireless access points. So if you don’t have a wire, you have a laptop, wireless access points, still connecting to the switch, still part of the network infrastructure. So what we’re talking about is how do we manage and monitor that. It’s pretty obvious how we manage and monitor PCs. You know, we do antivirus, we do agents, we’ll walk up to it, we’ll take a look at it, we’ll sit at it for you. But how do we manage the networking stuff?
Mike: So most people who deal with their own computers and just sit at a desk and do their stuff, they don’t even know where to look for that stuff, right? I mean, they don’t even know where their infrastructure is. Correct, Dave?
Dave: Absolutely. When you brought up the first point about driving at the traffic infrastructure, you hit it right on the button, you’re driving down the road, all of a sudden there’s a traffic jam, there’s a car accident, there’s unknowns on the road.
Steve: Yeah.
Dave: And it’s the same on you network, on your switch. There can be a bad port. It’s not working. There be too many people trying to go through one of the channels on the switch and you’re able to monitor and view that and change the traffic around.
Steve: Yeah, maybe you’ve outgrown your equipment.
Dave: Yeah. It’s kind of like you use “Waze”, you find a different way to get there Mike. But in today’s world and everything’s moving to the cloud, your infrastructure is more important than ever. And people have some of these old switches that have been there 10-15 years.
They’re, like, riding on Route 1 with traffic in the middle of the summer and you can’t move.
Steve: Yeah.
Dave: And you need to have wider paths. So those machines have access to the programs they need.
Mike: So Steve you and the folks from Portsmouth Computer Group, you actually can go inside the infrastructure and actually see what’s going on with the network infrastructure, right?
Net View
Steve: Yeah. We have a tool we call it Net View. We call it our Net View, PCG Net View, and we put an agent on a server, or a PC if you don’t have any servers.
Mike: Yeah.
Steve: Because we’ve been talking these last couple of months about maybe getting rid of the servers out of the room, but we put an agent on there, and then it goes and talks to all of the different equipment. It talks to that switch. It talks to that firewall, it talks to that. Those wireless access devices.
It talks to any load balancers you might have for your bandwidth, and then it gives us a real time view of that. It can tell us, it gives us metrics, it gives us logging, it gives us…we can see what devices they are, we can make maps of the network and it should, it really can show us whether things are running well. They can show us where the bottlenecks are. You hear in the networking world, we talk about bottlenecks all the time, right? So bottlenecks are where, where that one point with your network infrastructure where things…think of it like a traffic jam.
Mike: Just like traffic, yeah.
Steve: Exactly, that one exit down at Trapelo Road, right, that they’re always talking about?
Mike: Right.
Steve: So what is the bottleneck in your network? We used to guess at it years and years ago. Dave and I would sit and we talk, well why don’t we try a different switch? Or maybe they need a better firewall. There’s a lot of “maybe” — there’s no maybe anymore. Now we look at the tool, we look at the metrics and we say, “that’s where the problem is. It’s right there.”
Mike: So is this something, Dave, that clients should sort of like do a quarterly? I mean something doesn’t have to be wrong for you guys to look into the network infrastructure. I mean you can be…
Dave: It has to be on all the time, just like your road, your traffics, you check your air flight, you’re going to be. Is there any issues with the weather delays? This is running all the time because things do fail.
Mike: But you guys can look into this on a frequent basis just to make sure that nothing is going wrong.
Dave: Correct. And it is monitored 24-7. So if there is an issue, we’re aware of it.
So think about a storm, or an electrical storm. These ports on a switch, think of it as your electrical panel in your house. The fuse could pop. You’re not going to get a certain power in that area. The same thing if you’re working on your machine right now and all of a sudden something happens on the port, you’re, you’re clueless. Now you’re going to call your vendor. What do I do? You’re crawling under there with your wire, but now we can see it’s the bad port. Mike, why don’t you go here, plug your wire into here. Then you’re operational.
Mike: Pretty cool stuff.
Steve: Yeah, I got an alert like that for one particular company. We were just…I’d never seen an alert like that before. This single port on the switch was at, like, 96% utilization.
Mike: So what was the cause of that?
Steve: So when I went onsite and went and found where the wire went into the switch, and then what number that was, and then went to that office and the gentleman in that office had been just trying to upload files and was getting very slow performance. He was the usual, “I thought it was my computer”. Moved the wire around. He had a gigabit network adapter, but he wasn’t using gigabit. I moved the wire and made his life. He was, “Oh my God, my files are already uploaded.”
Mike: Yeah.
Steve: And that was something where I saw it. He probably would never have said anything to me, Mike. He probably wouldn’t have said, “Hey Steve, I’m having a problem.” You just would of kind of suffered through it, is the best way to put it. But our tool pointed out to me, I came and knocked on his door. It was a really good feeling. It was good to be able to see that happening.
Benefits of Network Monitoring
Mike: So what are some of the other benefits of network monitoring besides finding the errors and reporting the errors?
Dave: I think a big part of is the documentation, actually knowing all your assets that are on the network. A lot of people plug switches in. They could be under a desk, they could be anywhere. So this is actually giving a good idea exactly where all my assets are, what things are plugged. They’re getting out. And as Steve said, someone added a new access point. It wasn’t working. They went and bought when the store and plugged it in. All of a sudden people are complaining, we can know, “Oh, look what something just added to the network. We weren’t even aware of that.”
So having an awesome view of what’s there. The documentation actually see what it does. Think of this as your dashboard in your car. You see when your gas is getting low, you see your oil, you see your temperature, you see your…how fast you’re going. You have awesome statistics on what’s going on. Which helps us troubleshoot. And that’s the big point for the customers, Mike, is troubleshooting, as Steve said earlier on a wire, you’ve got to get in your car and drive two hours and go figure out a wire. This helps you solve the problem a lot quicker.
Mike: Yeah. Interesting stuff. So I mean the networks can be very, for me to understand what the network are. It’s got to be very complex. I would imagine…
Steve: Yeah.
Mike: For you guys, obviously it’s a lot easier.
Steve: Yeah. And that has a lot of time too. We’ll go into a company and we’ll talk to users or even just the person who’s in charge and you get to the networking part of it and it becomes like a whole other language. Like I can talk about Windows and they’ll get what I’m talking about, and I’ll talk about the servers and the servers are just really big PCs. Like, to them…
Mike: Because they’re using them.
Steve: Sure. Exactly. So their hands are on them, Mike. Exactly. But you start talking about the traffic and the ports that are going through the firewall.
Mike: I wouldn’t know that, yeah.
Steve: And they do, their eyes roll in their head. That’s my job. That’s my part. So this is a tool that absolutely gives me a view into that. So I can say, I can take the uncertainty out of it. I can say, you know what? I know that those people in that part of the building are having a problem, but it’s not that wireless access point. There’s actually a bad port on the switch and we’re not fumbling around replacing equipment we don’t have to replace.
Dave: Yeah, we had a scenario, Mike, last week, that since more and more information and applications or data in the cloud, the users are starting to use it a lot more and all of a sudden complaining about the performance. And it makes us start thinking about, well how’s your internet connection? So we’re able, as Steve said, you going out the firewall where your internet connection is only 10 over 20, it really should be a 50. So you can see what’s going on. Tell them from not just guessing. Here’s your problem right here.
Let’s call the vendor for, I think they were using Consolidated, and we upped the internet speed and within a few days we’re back to normal.
Mike: Yeah.
Dave: So, you’re able to isolate, see the problem and help solve it and that’s the key to the stuff today for being, as Steve said earlier, you’re working on a Windows server. You’re dealing with security. That stuff that’s below the wires, the infrastructure, you just expect it to work. You need visibility.
Mike: Absolutely. You guys are the experts on that. I get frustrated with my network when my Netflix doesn’t connect.
Dave: Same thing, you could have an issue with your wireless in your house.
Mike: Everyone told me, well, reboot your router. Unplug everything. Wait 30 seconds, see if that helps a little bit.
Steve: But you’re guessing.
Mike: I don’t know.
Dave: That’s what I’m saying, guessing. This gives you real data.
Mike: I’m looking at the lights on the modem. I’m looking at the lights on the wireless router. I’m looking at everything I could think of, but I don’t really know. I don’t have the expertise.
Steve: Yeah, I get that question a lot. Users will come up to me when I’m doing company work, but they’ll say, “Hey, can I ask you a question?”
Mike: My Netflix.
Steve: I’ve got, I’ve got three kids at home and I’m watching Netflix, they’re watching Netflix. My wife is, and it’s terrible. Where is the problem? And you start working it out with them.
Mike: Sorry, I can’t answer that right now.
Steve: Yeah.
Dave: But this is a great new service we’ve come about through some research. We’ve probably been very active with the last four or five months, but it’s a great new asset and benefit to the clients that we serve.
Mike: It sounds good. You got a couple of seminars coming up. You want me to mention one that I have? We don’t have the location yet, but it’s coming up in October.
Ransomware / Cryptolocker
Dave: Yep. We’ve had a great topic here two weeks ago on the ransomware CryptoLocker.
Mike: Yeah.
Dave: So a lot of high demand. People want to know more and more about it. We actually were at one of the municipalities visiting a local police department and the FBI and some of the SJ troopers were there. Mentioning there had been six to seven major breaches at local PDs here in the state of New Hampshire.
Mike: Wow.
Dave: And they started telling us about X and X that we don’t really know about, but it’s there. They’re coming after the small businesses and Steve and myself and probably one of our other techs, we’re going to do a talk about ransomware, how it happens and how you can prevent it and it’d be some great takeaways so your business can minimize that risk.
Mike: Yeah, that’s coming up on October?
Dave: October 22nd, which is a Wednesday.
Mike: We’ll have more details on location.
Dave: Details are up on the site, but we’ll have the location, should be a great topic.
Mike: I say every time. Ever since I’ve saw that piece on 60 minutes about ransomware and then we talked to you the following Tuesday.
Dave: Right.
Mike: I’m just blown away by it. How easily people will pay to get their information back.
Steve: So this’ll be the third or fourth time I’ve done this presentation, Mike, and I always start with…I always say the same thing. Here’s some scary slides and I start to run the numbers, the amounts of money and the breaches and in Texas, all the things that you saw in 60 minutes, I call them the scary slides.
Mike: Yeah.
Steve: And that’s how I started. And sure enough you see people look. They’re just thinking about getting that number that they have to pay out of their own accounts payable like just, and it frightens them.
Dave: It’s in the news our times. I think people just need to know. It’s just a matter of when and our goal is to help make them plan and be ready for it.
Mike: No, the scary thing is with what I got out of the piece and talking to you guys was that it’s coming to our phones, which is not a good thing either. Oh man, thank you guys. Tech Tuesday with Dave and Steve today. Tech Tuesday, all put together and powered by Portsmouth Computer Group with convenient offices in Portsmouth and Dover, now open and Manchester and Portland, Maine. Check them out at PCGIT.com.
