2010年网络管理的七项决议

过去几周，我们看到了许多过去一年和十年的“十大榜单”，以及对未来一年的预测。读完我的第四十七份这样的清单后，我感到有点不满足。当然，事后诸葛亮是有道理的，预测总是伴随着许多免责声明，以至于你一开始就想知道自己能拿它们做什么。那么，你如何才能真正发挥作用呢?所有这些列表和预测中真正可行的是什么?当你在周末假期结束后的周一回到工作岗位，并期待着2010年的道路时，这里有一些“决心”的建议。建立对IP视频会议的理解。它很庞大，很糟糕，而且它将改变你的生活，尤其是当桌面视频会议开始流行起来的时候。视频会议是实时的，需要优先的QoS，低延迟和比VoIP多很多倍的带宽。如果你在推出VoIP的时候不得不从接线柜里抖出一些不可告人的秘密，你最好准备好面对更多的不可告人的秘密。 Start by finding out what type of video conferencing is being used or is planned for your workforce, and figure out how much load this will create on your network before it starts a viral ramp-up. 2. Become more application-aware. How can you really be in tune with the business or organization you are supporting if you don’t know where and how well the really important apps and services are running? And in the converse, how can you understand if the loads your network is carrying are even relevant or just so much streaming audio keeping remote office workers entertained during the business day? Look to NetFlow (or similar) data or packet-based monitoring tools to give you this perspective. 3. Start tracking user experience. Even if you love the thrill of firefighting and troubleshooting gnarly performance issues across distributed, n-tier architectures, the greatest satisfaction (and kudos) can be gained by recognizing a problem before calls start coming in to the help desk. And the first line of defense here is understanding what motivates users to call the help desk – their experience in using (or trying to use) the applications and services which IT provides. User quality of experience data can be gained via on-client agents, synthetic traffic generators (whether internally managed or externally subscribed), or by passively monitoring traffic and comparing request/response patterns. Best practices employ a mix of these, but any one is better than none. 4. Think proactive/preventative. Similar to #3, but more broadly speaking, an ounce of problem prevention is worth at least a pound of frantic troubleshooting cure. And there are lots of options here. One of the most effective is to get better change control in place, thus preventing the “oops” moments when the upgrade you roll out breaks something else (or a lot of other things). Others include using service mapping and assessing health and risk on a sustained basis, or using predictive analytics tools to help you sniff out the important early warning signs of pending issues hidden in all of that performance monitoring data you’ve been collecting. 5. Make friends with the system admins and app support guys. Ok, maybe that’s two resolutions, but it’s all about getting along better. Unless you are in the minority, your cross-organization working relationships usually look more like a Big Fat Greek Wedding than one big happy family. Take advantage of the fact that you can help to measure IT service delivery in a way that the other guys can’t – in context with everything else that is going across the wire – and share that data openly and freely. Many times, network-facing data can be the most effective place to start the triage process when no one else is able to get to the root of a problem. 6. Embrace automation. With the onslaught of virtualization (a.k.a. “server hide and seek”), mobility (a.k.a. “client hide and seek”) and composite web applications (a.k.a. you guessed it – “application hide and seek”) you won’t be able to keep up with all of the moving parts without automating discovery and upkeep of relationship recognition and modeling. Automation is also available for responding to well-known event scenarios with pre-scripted actions, change management for configuration roll-backs, compliance auditing, and predictive analytics. 7. Figure out how to leverage virtualization. One of the more interesting evolutions of management technology is the growth in the number of hypervisor platforms in place around your network. What started purely as a computing system concept has rapidly spread to network equipment, so you can now deploy management tools to new places as virtual images or virtual appliances quickly and easily. Keep these in mind when you are trying to work out how to achieve better distribution of management tools and instrumentation. So – good luck to all in 2010, and good luck keeping those resolutions!!