Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

This post is part of a series featuring customers, partners, and experienced DX Unified Infrastructure Management (DX UIM) practitioners. We’ve asked these expert users to share their knowledge with the broader DX UIM community. Today, we’re featuring Kathy Solomon, the Unix Systems Administrator for the R&D Support organization within Broadcom IT.

Links are the plugs, sockets, cables, and electrical signals traveling through a network. Every link implies a function. At the hardware level, electronic signals activate functions; data are read, written, transmitted, received, checked for error, etc. At the software level, instructions activate the hardware (access methods, data link protocols, etc.). At higher levels, the data transferred or transmitted may request functions to be performed (client/ server, program-to-program, etc.).

Regex—short for regular expressions—is a way to describe a search pattern. They can be used to find a text pattern or string (character sequence) within a larger body of text, such as a sentence or paragraph, but even entire documents and databases. They can be used to quickly find specific text in a text document like a configuration file for a network device. Need to know what IP addresses a device has? What VLANs are on a switch? What devices are using a deprecated DNS server?

Monitoring the Windows devices in a network is difficult yet essential since the devices are tasked with the critical functioning of the network. The challenges and complexity increase multi-fold for an enterprise network because each device is associated with many events, services, and processes that must be monitored to ensure the hassle-free operation of both the devices and the network. The devices should be monitored constantly by a network monitoring tool.