Tag Archive | "Networking"

BSM could help resolve VDI network challenges

Tags: BSM, Business Service Management, Enterprise IT, Monitoring, Networking, VDI


Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) provides many advantages for IT by removing a number of the variables involved in managing individual networked PCs. When you give end users what is essentially a dumb terminal with a set of defined services, it can be easier to control and maintain, but it can also present challenges across a network because the entire system is dependent on the network with nothing offloaded to the individual machines (as with stand-alone networked PCs).

According to a recent post by David Greenfield on Network Computing, this is even more pronounced when you spread out from a LAN environment to a WAN. He cited several studies that use a variety of formulas to determine just how much bandwidth is required for each user across the network (before you start hearing loud complaints about network performance).

He writes:

A good rule of thumb when running PCoIP is three users per 1Mb. This allows for variance in the display activity between multiple users and provides a range of bandwidth most likely to provide acceptable performance for user.

Whether you buy that or not, it’s a number that you can work with as a basis for discussion if nothing else. If you figure that you require this much bandwidth, you can start to set your monitoring equipment to let you know when the system starts to degrade below these levels (before it reaches a critical state and your IT help desk is bombarded with angry phone calls).

For end users, a sudden slow-down might seem like a front end service issue, when in fact, the problem is the underlying network or a database processing problem. Having BSM monitoring in place can not only help you ensure (to the extent it’s within your control) that the network throughput is operating at the maximum rate possible, but you can also determine if one of the underlying hardware or database connectors on which these services depend is what’s causing the problem.

With BSM in place, you can watch the entire system, and that can help you solve your VDI problems before they reach a point where it adversely affects your user base.

Photo by olishaw on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.

Outages Can Wreak Havoc on Productivity

Tags: Availability, Business Service Management, Gmail, Intuit, IT, Monitoring, Networking, Outages, Skype


In September, 2009 Gmail went down for two hours. To hear the complaining on social networks like Twitter at the time, you would have thought the entire world had come to a stand-still, but for many people it did. That’s because this service meant more to them than just a nice-to-have free service. People had actually come to depend on it to communicate for business and personal means. 

Other high profile outages have followed including the Intuit outage last June and the Skype outage in December. These two outages lasted more than a day, leaving many unhappy users in their wakes and providing a snapshot for you of what happens when your systems go down.

People who need these services to do their jobs are left looking for work-arounds that IT might not ultimately be happy with (like using unauthorized services to try and get something done).

The fact is that as you sit there looking at your monitoring dashboard, there are real people behind those red lights trying get their work done, and these stories illustrate in a very concrete fashion that when services go down–whether it’s a public service or a private one– it can have a profound impact on actual users.  It can be easy to forget that as you look at the data in front of you on monitors, but it’s important to keep in mind that it’s not just some abstract representation of the service levels inside your company.

In fact, for every red light you see on the dashboard, is another person unable to complete a task using that service and the more mission critical it is, the bigger the effect.

So as you monitor your systems, and review your data and watch the activity streaming through your equipment, always remember that there are humans who depend on these tools to do their jobs, and when a service goes down, even for a little while, it can have major ramifications.

Photo by nan palmero on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License