Mutiny Blog

Deploying a tried-and-tested network monitoring solution mitigates risk to your business, minimises downtime and optimises your network efficiency. Yet making the ROI argument presents a challenge for resource-pressed SMEs who may also consider themselves safeguarded from serious harm by the simplicity of their set-up. Yet even with a basic network topology some easily avoidable issues raise their head time and time again. 

All too often a simple oversight results in downtime, and even when issues don’t impact application performance or cause service outage they still prevent the network from performing at an optimised level. Additionally, they mean vulnerability of your infrastructure, leaving you open to the unknown aggregate impact of multiple-device failure. 

We’ve identified five scenarios in no particular order; each simple and commonplace but with significant potential to cause loss of data and serious disruption to your organisation’s operations. What’s more, the financial cost of undertaking a resultant damage limitation exercise can be high, and associated reputational damage is hard to quantify. If you have responsibility for network performance management within an SME environment take heed -- you may well encounter one or more of the below issues. 

1. Unseen RAID failures

A common discovery upon initial visit to customer site to install the Mutiny network monitoring appliance is that administrators have neglected to notice a failed disk. Redundant by design, the array continues to function as normal as far as the user is aware. Unless operators are alerted to the failed disk the network becomes exposed to a failure of the logical disk. Fortunately, we are installing a proactive network analysis tool which provides true visibility, alerts you accordingly and protects your business assets before the disk failure takes effect.  

2. No unified time source

We also find drifting clocks on virtualised systems to be one of the latest ‘gotchas’ in the network. Virtualising your services using the various virtualisation platforms is a great way to rationalise your hardware, but keeping clocks in sync is often overlooked and can lead to problems long after you think the job is complete.

3. Expired DNS

So you’re getting email but no-one has noticed that not many external emails are getting through – until – that is, users start complaining that their customers have sent emails that have bounced. With a cry of, “Who forgot to renew the external DNS services?” you commence the renewal process, but to your horror realise that this happened a week ago and now the caching DNS servers are expiring your records across the internet. If only you had been testing them… 

4. Aircon failure 

The air-conditioning system is covered under a service contract and is, very often, another team’s responsibility. But they – like you – are not aware that it has failed. Monitoring temperature may appear trivial and is often not visible to IT whose services rely absolutely on it working. Environmental conditions like a loss of air-conditioning are common causes of service failure. Mutiny supports additional environmental devices to cover this critical area. A number of vendors are supported natively by the mutiny system including APC, Unite Technologies, Jacarta and other generic devices through trap alerting.

5. Mains power outage

You reassure yourself, “We’re OK-- we have a UPS.” Perhaps you are, unless it’s Friday night and the power has gone off for longer than the batteries last, in which case you won’t find out until Monday morning when half your services are down! An SMS to let you know you were running on batteries could have so easily given you that all important heads up…

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