Network Information Structuring for Your Devices in Your Network

Summary: Find out how to diagnose, solve, and document network information structuring for the devices in your network. Dave Hodgdon and Lonnie Cherry discuss how IT professionals conduct this type of network work. Listen or read more to find out about network information structuring for devices.

Mike:  It’s all part of Tech Tuesday here on News Talk 98.1.Portsmouth Computer Group powering the WTSN morning information center. PCG IT for world-class IT service and customer support. You can check them out at pcgit.com, they’ve got convenient locations in Portsmouth and Dover and brand new locations in Manchester and in Portland, Maine. Dave and Lonnie join us this morning. Good to see you back here, Dave. Welcome, good morning.

Dave Hodgdon: Top of the morning.

Mike:  He went, he had a nice vacation. Mexico.

Dave: Winter vacation to Mexico. Went down to a Mayakoba about 25 minutes south of Cancún.

Mike:  But yeah, good weather?

Dave: Yeah, good weather. Very tropical, very jungle-y. The canals, taking the boats, the boat ride, the boat rides, the bikes. It was a lot of fun. The water was like —

Mike:  Had you been down there before? Had you been down there before?

Dave: I had never been down there before.

Mike:  Oh cool.

Dave: I’d rather be on the island, but it was nice.

Mike:  Yeah. Good to see you, Lonnie, how are you?

Lonnie Cherry: Good morning, Mike. How are you?

Network Infrastructuring Monitoring Basics

Mike:  Good. So, we’re going to talk a little bit today about something which we have to kind of break down for our listeners here. Network infrastructuring monitoring for your switches, firewalls, wireless access points, routers, UPSs —

Lonnie: What are we talking about here?

Dave: Pretty much monitoring devices that usually get forgotten in your network. Switches, firewalls and items like that have never been completely a part of a traditional monitoring software that we’ve used in the industry before.

Mike:  So how . . . so, this is becoming more and more important to consumers and businesses because why?

Lonnie: Mainly because the meantime to repair, the ability to get in there and look at some early troubleshooting that you wouldn’t typically have for these devices and to provide us a way to quickly, easily discover problems that years ago could’ve taken us a little bit more time to really realize what the problem is.

Mike:  Does this . . . is this really important stuff, Dave, that people should be aware of?

Dave: Absolutely. Mike, the trend everything moving to the cloud right now, more of your data centers are not in your building. So the only way to get out there is through these devices. It’s kind of like the . . . think of all the roads to go out to the main highway. There’s always congestion. So, you know the switches, like your electrical panels where all the computers get plugged in. If that’s not working, you’re not getting online, you’re not getting into your email.

If the firewall’s not on, you’re being blocked to get out. If the wireless access point is not functioning or too many people on it, it’s not going to work. So, this stuff is really becoming critical for us to allow that business to have that uptime and knowing the visibility of what’s going on.

Mike:  Do you know, I know you guys are the experts. I would imagine a lot of companies, you know, within their departments of networks and things like that, they probably don’t even know about this stuff. I would imagine that it just gets washed over sometimes.

Dave: I think Lonnie kind of hit the button right there. A lot of people just feel you’ve got to monitor the servers and the desktops, but without these other devices. You know, you go to your house, you don’t think about the electrical outlets everywhere. But without that electrical panel working, your power’s not working. So, it’s kind of the same thing that the switches are critical.

And one of them can fail, Mike, very easily. If Lonnie didn’t have this software, he could be looking for hours, “Where’s the problem with the software and alerting?” We can see, “Oh, it’s port number 24. Oh, that’s Mike’s office. Let me move that wire to another active.”

Mike:  Oh, I see, okay.

Dave: It’s working because those switches, any one of those can fail at any time.

What Happens When an Alert Comes Up

Mike:  So, talk a little bit about what things people can do about this. I mean, when you come in and do this type of work, what actually happens?

Dave: Well, this particular product we use is a software-based product that we’d run on one of their servers. And what it does is it collects network traffic logs and through SNMP version two it basically collects those logs in kind of real time scenario that we can see bandwidth constraints, we can see utilization logs on the switches and firewalls and such. We can see port utilization, we get logs, we can see configuration changes. These are items that traditionally we’d have to go into the device that we’re having a problem with or that we think we’re having a problem with and try to parse through pages and pages of logs.

Mike:  So, what happens exactly when these alerts come up, what actually happens?

Dave: Well, what actually happens when we get alerted . . . well, when the monitoring tools see something, it basically sends an alert to us telling us, “Hey, this is the problem currently with this device.” And then that gives us the ability to go in and run reports on that real time data that we’re looking for.

Mike:  So, you can actually go in from your location. You don’t have to actually go to the site?

Dave: No, not at all. I don’t even have to install the product from their location on site, I can actually install it remotely.

Mike:  That makes it a lot easier.

Dave: You just have a great visual. Just think of the traffic controllers with the airplanes. They got the whole view of all the planes where they’re flying, what’s going on. We have a great visual of all their devices and . . . examples, you have a convention center, you have a big event, people are using the wireless. And there’s only so many people that can get onto that access point. So, we have the ability to maybe move some traffic to another access point.

Another scenario is you might be having a software application that many people are trying to get onto the server with it, but as Lonnie just said, there’s congestion. Everyone’s trying to get to the highway on that same merge at the same time. It slows down. All those cars are trying to get into one lane right there, Mike. And this gives you the ability to kind of separate that traffic and dispense the load.

Mike:  So, it’s almost like when I . . . I’ll give you an example. I don’t know, like the new movie coming out this week is called “Avengers Endgame”.

Dave: Oh, kids are blowing up for that.

Mike:  It’s blowing up all websites because people are trying to get tickets online and that seems to be a common problem. That’s a typical problem —

Dave: You just said it right there that all these people are trying to get to a particular site and there’s only so much you can handle it.

So, for every business they might be trying to get to one program, there’s a lot of people trying to get to the wireless access point, they could be having a big event. This gives us the infrastructure, kind of like the backbone of what we’re trying to look for. And then she gives us the ability to it in real time too, see where that congestion is landing.

Mike:  And what kind of products do you use to look at these sites? What kind of… I know you mentioned a little bit already but, in layman’s terms, what actually is it? Is it just something that… This scans your system and looks at all the different ports and looks at all the different applications that you’re using to see what’s right and what’s wrong.

Dave: Exactly. It goes through, like I said, through SNMP that or is turned on on each individual device and actually reads that data that’s coming off of those devices and logs that data.

Lonnie: Another . . . you know, think about it like a UPS battery, kind of like the little generator battery for a server, PC. It can see if that battery is failing. So before it’s failing, alert’s coming to us, right? So it’s so many of these little things. They’re just allowing us to give that customer more uptime. That’s all what it’s about.

Dave: And early detection.

Lonnie: Early detection. If these things that… You know, we had one customer that we spent hours and hours troubleshooting and we determined if this product was in place, cut our time down one 10th the time because the information is there for you, Mike, to help you troubleshoot where the problem is. Crawling under desk looking for wiring and jacks and, “Where’s the problem?” And switches hidden in closets, buried up in the ceiling. You go to businesses and this stuff is everywhere. It’s been a hodgepodge of just switch, switch, switch.

And if you don’t know where the problem is you could, you’re just chasing your tail. And then finally now this tool is allowing us, “Oh there’s the one that’s failing.” Then you open up in the ceiling, you see the switch and there’s the magical a moment, “There you go, we found our problem.”

Documenting the Issues

Mike:  How do you document all these things? Once you find out all these problems, how do you guys document all this?

Lonnie: The tool itself actually has the ability to integrate with our document management software. So, once it’s discovered the devices that are on the network, it documents it right into our document management software which is cool.

Dave: Which is really cool.

Lonnie: I think a lot of times people tend to forget about these things, Mike, these devices become very old. In the old days a switch used to be called a hub. A hub was like, you know, think of riding on Route 1 compared to Route 95. Everything these days gigabit and faster. And we have a lot of switches out there that people, they don’t tell us about, but they’re buried behind a desk of this old hub.

I was over one of our clients, they had a golf course and they were complaining about the speed. You know, you look around, you look around, you finally find where this thing is and it’s been buried there and it’s sitting . . . there’s the magical moments right there.

So, it’s really going to help you have that customer have a better experience and everyone wants things faster. They want to surf faster, they want to get their stuff. And when they complain to us and we can’t figure it out . . . you know, because our old tools are just monitoring the PC and the server. Now we have added value that we actually can see where that problem might be.

Mike:  But even on business and normal consumer computers now, I mean the processes are becoming faster and faster, right? We want it instantaneously. We want that thing to the boot up quickly and we want to go to our first website, wherever we’re going, wherever we’re pointing that a mouse to. We want it to be there within milliseconds.

Dave: Everybody does.

Mike:  Yeah. It’s the way of the world, right?

Dave: Yeah. But you think about it, everything has to go through the wire out to the switch, through the router, through the firewall, or through the wireless access point —

Mike:  — Before you can access the information.

Dave: Before you get access. Because today everyone is doing more and more of this . . . we call this network infrastructure. All these devices we’re talking about, Mike. And it’s just not about the PC and the server anymore. You’ve got to have that infrastructure because more and more is going to be in the cloud. And if you can’t get to it . . . that’s why we feel this is right up at great value for our clients.

Mike:  Do you say that as more people and more businesses have kind of outdated systems that they need to update these things more? Do you sense that in dealing with clients all the time?

Dave: I would say switches get ignored? Yes.

Lonnie: Yeah. 50:50 too.

Dave: Yeah, I would say most people understand the value of the firewall. We’ve talked about security all the time. They change that. the old days of the original wireless access points from 10 years ago, those are older.

They have the newer speeds that people are putting in the newer stuff because it’s not about just having four or five people in the business on the wireless, Mike, they all have phones. They bring in friends or guests that this original device can only handle 5, 10, 15 users, now there’s 30 people on this wireless and it can’t perform the way the old ones did. So, it has come a long way.

Mike:  And whatever you do, don’t use password 123456.

Dave: And tape it to your monitor or your keyboard. Security 101.

Mike:  Lonnie and Dave. Any final words, Dave?

Dave: As I said PCG is growing, we’re looking to hire. If anyone is interested, give us a ring. We are looking for Tier 1 and Tier 3 engineers, winning culture and a great environment to be in.

Mike:  And you guys have been expanding. You’ve got Portsmouth, Dover, now Manchester, Portland, Maine, right?

Dave: We’re moving into the other summer season, business is great. We’re . . . I’d say IT, it’s not a boring industry. If you’re not busy, something’s not right.

Mike:  All right, so you’re looking for workers, which is great. You’re very good. Lonnie, good to see you my friend.

Lonnie: Good to see you too.

Mike:  Dave, good to see you, welcome back.

Dave: My pleasure.

Mike:  Tech Tuesday with our good friends from Portsmouth Computer Group, PCG IT, check it out pcgit.com, all right? They’re conveniently located in Portsmouth and Dover and brand new locations in Manchester and Portland, Maine.