Watch Our Geek Speak Webcasts

Ever wanted to know more about how network traffic flow protocols like NetFlow, J-Flow, sFlow, and IPFIX work? What are the pros and cons of each and how will enabling them affect your network and how will the data that you get from them help manage your traffic? Join Josh Stephens (a.k.a. "Head Geek") for a total geek out session on this topic.

In this webcast, Josh will cover:

• The basics of traffic flow technologies
• The top 5 reasons to use them
• Possible downfalls – rumors and facts
• Comparisons of NetFlow, JFlow, SFlow, and IPFIX
• Deeper analysis of each traffic flow type
• Technologies that receive and analyze flow data

Did you know that there are powerful technologies embedded in Cisco IOS that can significantly simplify managing your network? You probably already have them on your network, now you just need to unlock their potential.

Watch this special geek-to-geek session featuring SolarWinds Head Geek, Josh Stephens, and Cisco Geek, Jimmy Ray Purser. Listen as they delve into the benefits of using IP SLA, NetFlow, and EnergyWise as part of your daily network management tactics and share their favorite secrets for leveraging IOS in your environment.

This webcast covers how to:

• Quickly diagnose network slowdowns between remote sites
• Analyze your network traffic
• Identify bandwidth hogs
• Reduce the energy consumption of your IP-based devices

It's been a while since our Head Geek went through the US Air Force's basic training program, but every time he visits San Antonio he can't help but sit up a little straighter and remember the drill sergeants ingraining within him the “military way” of folding his t-shirts, making my bed, cleaning my rifle, and singing the Air Force Song...

The foundation of things our Head Geek learned back in basic training are a large part of what's made him successful as a professional today.

In this webcast, our Head Geek puts on his drill sergeant's hat and discusses the basics that every network engineer, server chick, network manager, or IT dude should know about managing networks. This is a no-frills webcast where we focus on the fundamentals.

Some of the things that we'll cover are:

• Assessing your current capabilities
• Prioritizing your needs
• Baselines
• Fundamental technologies

No matter where you are in your career, you don't want to miss this session!

As network managers, it seems like we're always being asked to do more with less. Get better network performance from less bandwidth, manage more applications with fewer servers, and deploy more management and monitoring capabilities with a shrinking budget.

Are we fighting the impossible fight? Not at all... join this webcast to learn about five easy techniques to save you money (as well as time). We cover:

• Smart ways to use free tools
• The advantages of virtualization
• How to save on service provider costs
• Leveraging community-based knowledge
• Knowing when enough is enough – the right times to swap out your NMS

Today's IP networks are being asked to do more than ever before. As traditional IP data traffic like IP-based applications and web traffic grows exponentially, our networks are also challenged to support latency-intolerant applications like voice and video. One of the most effective and inexpensive ways to improve the performance of these networks is to implement some form of QoS.

In this webcast, we:

• Define and discuss different types of QoS
• Provide best practices for QoS deployment
• Review QoS monitoring practices
• Demonstrate QoS monitoring applications
• Learn when and why to deploy QoS

Creating and optimizing dashboards can improve visibility into network performance, decrease problem resolution time, increase staff productivity, and optimize system performance. Learn best practices for designing and implementing network management dashboards.

• Key elements every dashboard should have
• Different dashboards for different people
• Ways to optimize the performance of your dashboards
• Things to avoid in your dashboards
• Advanced customization of dashboards and other wicked cool tricks

Are you and your network ready for the new year? In this informative webcast, SolarWinds Head Geek, Josh Stephens, discusses his list of the top 3 things every network engineer should plan for in order to be successful in the 2010. Learn how to:

• Truly know your network. Understand where you have bottlenecks, single points of failure, and limited management visibility.
• Implement distributed management technologies. Understand how network performance metrics differ at different points throughout the network and how to gather those metrics.
• Manage Virtualization in the network. The virtual servers you saw in 2009 are multiplying and being joined by virtual switches and firewalls and virtual storage. Planning for this additional virtualization will be a key component of your success in 2010.

Today's networks are more complex than ever and require a comprehensive and well thought out network management strategy. While this usually implies spending money on off-the-shelf network management applications, used correctly, free tools can play an important role in your overall management plan. Watch as our Head Geek, Josh Stephens, discusses the best ways to leverage free tools along with some of the things to watch out for. He also demonstrates how to use his favorite five free tools in order to simplify common network management tasks such as:

• Virtualized infrastructure management
• Log management
• Network traffic analysis

Quality of Service (QoS) is back by popular demand! Part II of our Webcast series on QoS is a more technical, deeper dive into this technology.

This webcast covers:

• A quick refresher on QoS
• Traffic shaping
• Scheduling and queuing algorithms
• Congestion avoidance
• Cisco's Class-Based Quality of Service or CBQoS

It’s hard to imagine a network in today’s world that doesn’t or couldn’t benefit from implementing some form of Quality of Service. Watch this webcast and learn some of the things you need to know in order to successfully implement, manage, and monitor QoS on your network.

Configuration management is one of the surest and easiest ways to improve network reliability. Best-in-class configuration management tools can also save you a ton of time and improve the quality of your network operations. During this webcast you'll learn how to:

• Set up nightly config backups to easily roll back to a known good config
• Simultaneously change thousands of device configs
• Set up an alert to be notified anytime a config is changed
• Run a complete inventory report so you’re not paying maintenance for devices that aren’t on your network

Unless you’ve spent the last few years buried beneath Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) issues or lost somewhere within Active Directory, chances are that you’ve heard of Cisco IP SLA. Just in case you haven’t, it’s wicked cool technology that lets you have your routers and switches run traffic/application tests from their location in the network so that you can better understand how the network is performing. While this is nifty all by itself, the true power of IP SLA is exposed when you use a network management system to collect, analyze, and display the results from the IP SLA operations your devices are running. In this webcast, we explain Cisco IP SLA in detail and demonstrate how the new Orion IP SLA Manager makes implementing and leveraging Cisco IP SLA easy. Some of the things we cover are:

• What IP SLA is and how it works
• Which devices support IP SLA
• Best practices for deploying Cisco IP SLA
• Using Orion with Cisco IP SLA
• A tour of Orion IP SLA Manager

It's been a while since our Head Geek went through the US Air Force's basic training program, but every time he visits San Antonio he can't help but sit up a little straighter and remember the drill sergeants ingraining within him the “military way” of folding his t-shirts, making my bed, cleaning my rifle, and singing the Air Force Song...

The foundation of things our Head Geek learned back in basic training are a large part of what's made him successful as a professional today.

In this webcast, our Head Geek puts on his drill sergeant's hat and discusses the basics that every network engineer, server chick, network manager, or IT dude should know about managing networks. This is a no-frills webcast where we focus on the fundamentals.

Some of the things that we'll cover are:

• Assessing your current capabilities
• Prioritizing your needs
• Baselines
• Fundamental technologies

No matter where you are in your career, you don't want to miss this session!

Today's IP networks are being asked to do more than ever before. As traditional IP data traffic like IP-based applications and web traffic grows exponentially, our networks are also challenged to support latency-intolerant applications like voice and video. One of the most effective and inexpensive ways to improve the performance of these networks is to implement some form of QoS.

In this webcast, we:

• Define and discuss different types of QoS
• Provide best practices for QoS deployment
• Review QoS monitoring practices
• Demonstrate QoS monitoring applications
• Learn when and why to deploy QoS

Did you know that there are powerful technologies embedded in Cisco IOS that can significantly simplify managing your network? You probably already have them on your network, now you just need to unlock their potential.

Watch this special geek-to-geek session featuring SolarWinds Head Geek, Josh Stephens, and Cisco Geek, Jimmy Ray Purser. Listen as they delve into the benefits of using IP SLA, NetFlow, and EnergyWise as part of your daily network management tactics and share their favorite secrets for leveraging IOS in your environment.

This webcast covers how to:

• Quickly diagnose network slowdowns between remote sites
• Analyze your network traffic
• Identify bandwidth hogs
• Reduce the energy consumption of your IP-based devices

Join SolarWinds Head Geek, Josh Stephens and University of Western Kentucky's Jeffrey Stewart for a technical discussion of how to get the most out of your SolarWinds tools when it comes to troubleshooting and monitoring your network.

This special session is geared towards the unique needs of state and local government agencies and education organizations. Specifically, we discuss:

• Troubleshooting tips and technologies
• Network monitoring tactics for budget conscious networks
• Technical introduction to SolarWinds tools
• Case Study: University of Western Kentucky

Managing IP address space has changed a lot over the years. Back when our Head Geek (a.k.a. Josh Stephens) started networking, most everyone used public IP address space and kept track of their IP addresses in Excel®. And back then, IP was only one of the key protocols and was really not any more important than IPX, Vines, or AppleTalk.

Nowadays, IP is the most important thing on your network and the shortage of public IPv4 address space has network engineers resorting to technologies like Network Address Translation (NAT). And talk of IPv6 has many of us scratching our heads and wondering how/if/when it will affect us. About the only thing that hasn't changed are the spreadsheets.

Join us as we delve deeper into today's IP address space management challenges and expose some best practices and best in class technologies to make this task easier. Some of the things that we cover are:

• When to use public vs. private IP address space
• Complexities caused by private address space
• What you really need to know about IPv6 today
• Best practices for assigning and tracking IP addresses
• Key technologies for IP address tracking and management

We'll also take a look at SolarWinds Engineer's Toolset Version 10.0, including the exciting Workspace Studio™ feature.

In the first Network Troubleshooting Technologies webcast we covered IP SLA, NetFlow, SNMP, Traceroute, packet captures, and we even threw in a bonus #6—technology of network diagramming. The feedback was overwhelming – it seems that this is a subject close to everyone's hearts. We had a huge group of attendees, tons of questions, and even managed to run out of time.

In this webcast, we carved out more time for Q&A and we answered some of the key questions that we didn't get to last time around. We also expanded the technologies section to include 4 more – giving us a "Top 10 Technologies for Troubleshooting Networks."

This session includes:

• Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP)
• Telnet
• ICMP
• CAM, ARP, and the Switch Port Mapper
• SolarWinds' Engineer's Toolset Version 10.0 and the Workspace Studio
• An extended question and answer session

As network engineers, we're constantly looking for the best tools to use for diagnosing and solving network issues. That said, selecting the right tools to use for specific problems requires a deep understanding of how these different technologies work. Join our Head Geek as he dives geek-deep into five key network technologies, how they work, and what they're best used for.

In this webcast, we take an in-depth look at:

• SNMP
• NetFlow (cFlow, sFlow, JFlow)
• IP SLA
• Packet captures
• Traceroute
• SolarWinds Engineer's Toolset, including the Workspace Studio

Back in the old days, perspective wasn't all that important when it came to managing IP networks. Most WANs used a hub and spoke topology and so what we couldn't measure from a centralized NMS could at least be inferred. Today, things are very different. Frame relay has been replaced by MPLS as the technology of choice and many companies relay completely on Internet-based VPNs for site-to-site connectivity. Traffic no longer flows through the main office when going from site to site – we're now fully meshed and understanding network performance is now exponentially more complicated.

Fortunately, there are some great tools and technologies out there for solving these problems. At the top of the list – Cisco’s IP Service Level Agreements or IP SLA. Join SolarWinds Head Geek Josh Stephens for an in-depth look at the challenges associated with managing meshed networks and the advantages of leveraging best-of-breed technology like Cisco IP SLA. Key topics for discussion include:

• The impact of meshed networks on network management
• How meshed architectures affect network applications
• Key metrics for analyzing meshed network performance
• Cisco IP SLA and what it can do for you

Whether you're responsible for routers, switches, firewalls, Unix servers, Windows® servers, applications, or all of the above – how you consolidate, store, filter, and alert on log messages is a key part of your job. For several years many of us have focused on this art as a best practice and today it's even more than that. With regulations like PCI and Sarbanes-Oxley, effective log management may be the most important thing that you do.

Join SolarWinds Head Geek, Josh Stephens, as he delves into the black art of log management and consolidation and exposes the best kept secrets of this trade. On this webcast he covers:

• The necessity of log management in today's environment
• Event collection methods for disparate system types
• Log management architectures
• Strategies for effective, log-based alerting and filtering

It's a slow economy and your company is more interested in saving money than ever before. All of the sudden the fact that the networking gear you've already implemented is from one vendor has no bearing upon which vendor gets chosen the next go around – it's all about price and the fact these decisions will complicate your life exponentially isn't even a factor. Join Head Geek Josh Stephens as he discusses the complexities associated with managing heterogeneous networks and best practices for getting through them, including:

• Where to and where not to go multi-vendor
• Tips for coming up to speed with a new vendor's gear quickly
• Advantages of using standards-based management practices
• How to avoid having a separate network management application for every vendor's hardware you've purchased

Many organizations today are investing significantly in virtualization and are seeing both the benefits and challenges associated with these game-changing technologies. Join SolarWinds Head Geek Josh Stephens as he takes an in-depth look at monitoring ESX-based virtual environments and the unique challenges associated with them. In this webcast, he covers:

• Unique challenges of monitoring virtual environments, servers, and infrastructure
• Network management strategy differences for physical and virtual servers
• Management protocols for monitoring ESX Servers
• A deep look at the SNMP capabilities and MIBs available for ESX Server monitoring
• Understanding the ESX Server APIs and when to leverage them
• Best practices for enhancing monitoring capabilities

Let's face it – there's nothing worse than finding out about a problem on one of your application servers from an end user. However, staying one step ahead is tough given the complexities of application monitoring in today's environments. With acronyms like VMs, SANs, SaaS, VoIP, and QoS, and challenges like servers being virtualized, data storage out on the network somewhere, applications hosted by strangers, phone systems becoming part of the IP network, and more … it's no wonder that guaranteeing high quality of service can sometimes prove to be a challenge. So, what do we do? How do we ensure application health and performance?

Join Josh Stephens, SolarWinds Head Geek, as he unravels the mysteries of effective application and server monitoring and provides best practices for ensuring that you know where the issues are before your users do. In this session we'll discuss:

• The challenges of ensuring application health and performance in today's environment
• Best practices for monitoring application and application server health and performance
• Unique challenges for applications hosted on Windows platforms, Unix platforms, and outsourced/hosted applications
• Tips and tricks to ensure that you're the first to know when application quality has degraded

With today's advanced networks, it's no longer enough to focus purely on fault and performance management. In fact, it has been estimated by numerous industry watchers that up to 80% of performance problems and network downtime can be attributed to configuration changes. Many times our configuration changes are dynamic and numerous, so it's essential that we integrate configuration management into our fault and performance management system to ensure optimal network performance.

To get the full value of your technology investments, you must be able to make direct correlations between configuration changes and network health. Join SolarWinds Head Geek, Josh Stephens, as he discuss best practices for combining fault, performance, and configuration management into a single, unified approach for improving the overall health and efficiency of your network. Josh will talk in depth about:

• Essentials for fault and performance management
• Top challenges facing network engineers today
• Quick tips for error proofing your network
• Top 5 must haves for configuration management

Join SolarWinds Head Geek to learn the art of managing today's networks more efficiently! Does achieving "The 4-Hour IT Work Week" sound impossible? It's not surprising considering the myriad of complex and unique challenges you face on a daily basis, not to mention the fact that you probably have fewer and fewer resources to help you respond to issues.

Join Head Geek, Josh Stephens, as he explores ways to reclaim control of your network engineering life, work fewer hours, and still be the hero by leveraging best–in-class network management software, practices, and tools. Topics he'll cover In this webcast, include:

• Effective goal-setting techniques
• Advantages of virtualization
• Smart use of free tools
• Top 5 time savers
• Leveraging network management communities
• Best practices for monitoring your IT infrastructure

Network management architectures come in many shapes and sizes and deciding which to use on your network can be a daunting task. How do you distribute your network management system to lower the amount of network management traffic on your WANs? Are you able to collect network management data at your remote offices even if the connection to those offices is down?

Join SolarWinds Head Geek, Josh Stephens, to explore different network management architectures, how to choose between them, and best practices for deploying them in your environment. In the hour-long webcast Josh will duke it out between centralized and distributed networks:

• Round 1: The pros and cons of centralized network management architectures
• Round 2: The pros and cons of distributed network management architectures
• Round 3: Best practices for deploying network management architectures
• Round 4: Architecture options from SolarWinds

Do terms like SNMP, WMI, MIBs, OIDs, counters, and polling leave you with more questions than answers? Join Head Geek Josh Stephens as he explains the technologies behind network management systems and how you can use them to your advantage when managing a network.

Our Head Geek often gets asked about network management systems and what they do. So, he dedicated an entire geek speak session to this topic and provided some real-world tips that you can put to use in your own environment!

Topics included:

• Network management systems overview
• Polling and statistics collection
• Counters and gauges
• Technical analysis of management protocols including SNMP and WMI

Ever had to work late rolling out a bunch of changes to your routers? Fat-fingered an ACL update and brought down part of the network? What about locked yourself out of a router so badly that you had to get on a plane and fly to it to fix the problem? Our Head Geek hass been there. We all know that you should backup the configs on your routers, switches, and firewalls daily, but not many of us actually have time for it.

Network configuration management is one of those necessary evils that can if done correctly can make your life a whole lot easier. In this webcast, we talk about the tactical aspects of configuration management and how you can implement them, including:

• Basics of configuration management
• The scary side of doing nothing
• The top 5 ways that configuration management can help you
• How to evaluate configuration management solutions
• Configuration management and SolarWinds

Ever wanted to know more about how network traffic flow protocols like NetFlow, J-Flow, sFlow, and IPFIX work? What are the pros and cons of each and how will enabling them affect your network and how will the data that you get from them help manage your traffic? Join Josh Stephens (a.k.a. "Head Geek") for a total geek out session on this topic.

In this webcast, Josh will cover:

• The basics of traffic flow technologies
• The top 5 reasons to use them
• Possible downfalls – rumors and facts
• Comparisons of NetFlow, JFlow, SFlow, and IPFIX
• Deeper analysis of each traffic flow type
• Technologies that receive and analyze flow data

As network managers, it seems like we're always being asked to do more with less. Get better network performance from less bandwidth, manage more applications with fewer servers, and deploy more management and monitoring capabilities with a shrinking budget.

Are we fighting the impossible fight? Not at all... join this webcast to learn about five easy techniques to save you money (as well as time). We cover:

• Smart ways to use free tools
• The advantages of virtualization
• How to save on service provider costs
• Leveraging community-based knowledge
• Knowing when enough is enough – the right times to swap out your NMS

Trusted advisors from SolarWinds and Riverbed discuss the latest trends in WAN optimization and management. Harold Byun from Riverbed, an expert in wide-area data services with experience in both enterprise networking and storage management, join SolarWinds Head Geek Josh Stephens and NetFlow Product Manager Haley Oyler, to explore the many options for optimizing and managing WANs (plus, they'll provide best practices for each!)

Topics they cover include:

• Understanding the need for WAN optimization
• WAN optimization as a strategy – not just a set of technologies
• Deep dive on WAN optimization methods
• Best practices for deploying WAN optimization
• WAN management in an optimized environment

Today's IP networks are faster and more reliable than ever before. As a matter of fact, they've become so powerful that most enterprises rely on them daily for business critical applications, such as web-based applications, networked database systems, centralized e-mail services, and VoIP. Our Head Geek Josh Stephens shares some best practices on how to manage today's networks and the applications that ride over them. He's also invited one of his fellow geeks to chime in on the topic. We cover:

• Network application readiness – how to evaluate the network before network applications are deployed
• Fully-meshed network management strategies
• Monitoring and evaluating network application traffic
• Network-focused application monitoring

Managing networks within traditional enterprises is tough. And if you work for the government, you have additional requirements and special circumstances to consider. If you work within the DoD, not only are you managing some of the most complex networks in the world, but a lot more is riding on it than lost revenue and angry customers.

As a decorated veteran of the U.S. Air Force, Head Geek Josh Stephens focuses on the best practices he used for optimizing network management within government environments. During this session, he addresses topics including:

• Securing the management environment
• Assessing the manageability of the network
• Evaluating the currently deployed NMSs
• Selecting new network management applications
• Scalability and performance considerations
• Metrics and reporting

Do you need expert tips for defining a WAN management plan that addresses today's network challenges? Our Head Geek can help. Get the scoop on the latest trends for effective WAN management. Josh Stephens will be dishing out best practices for leveraging cost-saving technologies without impacting network performance.

You will learn practical pointers on how to define and implement an integrated WAN management approach including:

• Alert and event management
• Network capacity planning
• SLA management
• Management reporting (including dash boards)
• Network traffic analysis
• Hardware helpers (traffic accelerators and shapers)