CEO's Blog

A web shop has 4 seconds to deliver its webpages according to a study from JupiterResearch that examines consumer reaction to a poor online shopping experience - or the customer goes someplace else. While a few years ago usability expert Jacob Nielsen suggested 10 seconds to be the maximum time obviously the growing use of broadband connections has pushed the limit even further.

The report ranked poor site performance as second only to high product prices and shipping costs as leading factors for dissatisfaction among online shoppers. While prices may not always be so easy to change the speed of your online shop can be checked and optimized with tools like our Webserver Stress Tool.

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Question #4: Is the Price Right?

Cost, of course, is a major part of any procurement, but it should never be the sole or even leading variable in your evaluation of a monitoring solution. Bandwidth monitoring is simply too important to the overall success and viability of your operation for your team to be blinded — one way or the other — by price. Occasionally, cost can give you insight into how effective a solution may be, but it’s certainly not a fail-proof predictor of efficacy.

Frankly speaking, it’s both impractical and imprudent for your team to purchase solutions based almost entirely on price. As one can imagine, networking vendors weigh a complicated and unique set of internal and external variables to arrive at their various price points. In other words, price isn’t necessarily linked to a product’s functionality or features. And, as with any purchase, you shouldn’t use cost as a justification to bypass the due-diligence or research process that precedes any major procurement.

Question #3: Does It Have an Intuitive Interface That Can be Customized?

It’s critical that your solution allows users to create customized dashboards with graphs and tables that meet their specific departmental or project-based needs. Without customization, your monitoring tool may initially be well-received by team members, but, over time, it will likely become an under-used resource and be seen as something of a generic and predictable tool with limited practical functionality. Without customization, monitoring solutions become part of the operational status quo and, quite naturally, less of a staff priority. By comparison, customizable solutions prompt managers and team members to be engaged in the process, focus their monitoring efforts and take action to improve overall efficiencies. Monitoring bandwidth shouldn’t become a static procedure, but, rather, an interactive one that complements constantly changing operational goals.

Question #2: Does It Offer Secure Remote Access?

Ideally, the GUI of your preferred monitoring solution will be Web-based. In a truly global economy and in an era of increased telecommuting and flex schedules, your monitoring solution should be available to your entire team at any time — no matter where they perform their work on any given day. Finding a Web-based solution becomes essential if your team isn’t centralized in one office and is, instead, comprised of members in various far-flung offices. The more your staff can access the monitoring solution, the more they’ll use it and the more they’ll pre-empt problems linked to performance and availability. Simply put, your monitoring solution shouldn’t be anchored at a single location and hamstrung by basic geographic or logistical constraints when various Web-based applications exist.

Question #1: Is It Easy to Install and Deploy?

Good monitoring solutions don’t require users to embark on a multi-step process to get up and running. If the solution you’re considering requires you to buy several new servers to support it, you may want to re-assess your choice. And if the first step in the deployment process calls for you to participate in vendor-guided classes on how to use the product, keep looking. Essentially, if it seems like merely deploying a solution will sap valuable staff time and resources, consider it something of a red flag, trust your instincts and move on to the next solution.

Put another way, if a monitoring solution is, in any way, difficult to install, it almost assuredly won’t be fully integrated into your organization. In a software market full of network-monitoring solutions, it’s entirely unnecessary for you or your team to engage in complex or confusing installations. The bottom line is if you have adequate network equipment, you shouldn’t need extra hardware or outside help to support a robust monitoring solution.

Here is a short list of the top five reasons why you seriously should consider to implement bandwidth monitoring in your network:

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We had upgraded the last remaining dark and slow 100 Mbit corner of our data center from 100 Mbit Ethernet to Gigabit Ethernet the other day. We installed an HP Procurve 1800-8G which offers Gigabit for 8 ports.

As usual we began to monitor this switch using our PRTG software and found quite a surprise: PRTG reported steady peaks of 2.000.000 gigabit/s (2.000 terabit/s). Obviously something went wrong here.

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If you work in the networking industry, you no doubt spend more time than you’d like putting out the proverbial fire and then wondering how it started.

Your network — however well-conceived or well-engineered — will, invariably, create problems for you and your team at some point. So for those of us in the business of preventing problems, it’s essential that we lean on our bandwidth-monitoring solution and put it to work for us.

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We have been informed a couple of times that Microsoft’s anti-spyware software Windows Defender seems to be having issues with our software. After various tests, we are pretty certain this is not the case - if Defender is properly configured. We had Defender and our own PRTG Traffic Grapher and IPCheck Server Monitoring up and running on various test installations for a couple of days and were unable to discern any particular issues.

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We have all seen this: You want to send a multi-megabyte file to someone, but most mail accounts and mail servers don’t work with files beyond a few megabytes. But there are some website services that come to the rescue: They enable you to send large files. The solution: You upload the file to the service website and simply mail the download link to the recipient.

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