The geeks of the world will always be interested in the technology.  The rest have no desire to know how it works.  As the “early settlers” of the Internet become the old timers it leaves room for the “kids” who have grown up with technology.  To them the network is something that is everywhere.  Kind of like asking why the sky is blue.  Most people just care that the sky is not falling.  The network will be the same way as time progresses.  With the push toward the “Cloud” we will see the technology become more and more seamless to the end user.

Some good articles on the subject;

http://www.rageboy.com/stupidnet.html

http://www.isen.com/papers/Dawnstupid.html

You should be worried about two types of monitoring.  UP/Down monitoring and utilization monitoring. Up/Down monitoring does checks to see if the devices are “alive”.  Most of the time this is a simple ping.  The better the package the more intelligent it is about detecting flapping, packet loss, and excessive round trip times.  This is important because there is a fine line between false alerts and not being alerted enough.  You want the monitoring software to be able to detect the difference between a device being down and it simply being slow to get to.  Both of these are important to know.  Two of the most popular packages we work with are Nagio & Whats Up Gold (WUG).There are many tutorials and help topics on the net.  Plus MTIM can install, configure, and maintain an installation for you.

Nagios (http://www.nagios.org/)

WhatsUP Gold (http://www.whatsupgold.com/)

The above packages support such features such as e-mail & text alerting, link flap detection, the ability to support alert groups, escalations, and the ability to tie devices together so you don’t receive 10 alerts because 1 tower went down.  All of these are important features because they allow you to scale, and generally make your life easier.

The other aspect of monitoring is utilization.  Utilization allows you to do trending and see which parts of your infrastructure are reaching capacity.  Commercial programs such was WhatsUP can also do utilization.  An Open source package such as Cacti (http://www.cacti.net) can create graphs of interface utilization.

In addition to standalone tools, some billing programs such as Azotel (http://www.wispsolutions.com/billing-software.html) are able to do monitoring.  This is helpful for CSR’s who are in the billing software on a daily basis.  =

There are many other tools out there, but the above mentioned tools are some of the most popular.  This means you can obtain support from a variety of sources.   In a future series we will discuss some of the best practices when setting up a monitoring solution.

The Indiana Dept. of Transportation has deployed a statewide wireless Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) incorporating many different components – from speed and weather sensors, to dynamic messaging signs, to video surveillance cameras.

Towers have been popping up all along the major interstates. Will take some pictures.

Oregon’s State Interoperability Executive Council (SIEC), has voted to prepare a waiver that seeks permission from the FCC to build a public-safety statewide broadband wireless network, reports FireChief.com