How to Gain Perspective

Chris Pirillo — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 20:15:30 +0000

Having first met Traci on Twitter a while ago (here), I’m finally answering one of her Questions of the Day: “When you feel like doing everything yourself, do you stop and think if it is really worth doing it at all?”

I’m not really sure what keeps me going, other than the belief that I’m working FOR something (not just AT something).

That “something” is seemingly ever-elusive, however; what I was working for 10 years ago was certainly different than what I was working on 5 years ago… was certainly different than what I was working on yesterday.

To tell you the truth, I know I can’t do everything on my own – and have certainly relied on friends and colleagues to help. I depend on nobody but myself to do the things I want to do, however (and I believe self-reliance does not take away from surrounding yourself with supportive people).

Seldom do I stop to ask myself if “all this” is worth doing. I just assume it’s worth doing for one reason or another – to fill my time, to fill my soul, to fill my legacy (and yes, to fill my bank accounts). Certainly, there are moments when I wonder if I’m working TOO hard – and that’s when I have to rely on those closest to me to remind me to step away from the computer and do something different (if only for a brief period).

Perspective is never gained by living on the line.

Traci is from Hawaii and is also a fan of serendipity. I’ve been to Hawaii twice in my life – and each time was an unmitigated disaster (through no fault of the destination). I was taken out of my element long enough to realize that it takes me a few days to acclimate to a new environment. In another week, I plan on returning to Oahu – if only to remake August 1st as a personal day. There’s at least one tweetup planned, and I’ll undoubtedly be recording videos with old and new friends during my stay. Yes, I’m hoping to gain more attention for Gnomedex, too. Maybe I’ll see you there?

What about you? Offer your answer to Traci.

How to Gain Perspective

What is the Best Network Management Tool?

Chris Pirillo — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 07:49:49 +0000

What is the Best Network Management Tool?

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I know many of you out there have to manage a network. The folks over at PacketTrap have been instrumental in helping our community grow. They’ve now come out with Perspective – an excellent tool to help manage your network! Brian and AK from PacketTrap came to visit via Skype, in order to help me explain to all of you what PacketTrap Perspective can do for you!

Monitor performance for routers, hubs, switches, servers, and applications in real-time – no matter the platform. Yeah, you can use this Windows tool to watch your Macs or Linux boxes!
Plus, it’ll watch the health of your VMware servers (and guest Virtual Machines running on ‘em). And just in case you hate being tied to one machine, or if you have more than one person who might need to access this data, an unlimited amount of users can connect to Perspective via a thin client or Web browser (which means, you can access statistics FROM your Mac or Linux). There’s advanced email and SMS alerts for devices, too. Capture traffic data for any device on the network to boot.

You can see all of the web sites that are being served at your home or company. You can see who is loading what site! You can even see what impact this surfing is having on your bandwidth. Perspective will show you who is clogging up your network, as well as how they’re doing it. There’s a list of different tools and reports you can make use of.

You can view and manage every aspect of what’s going on within the network.

I have tried so many network scan tools in the past, and haven’t had much luck. Perspective is very intuitive, and easy to set up (even for geeks like me). I’m not used to seeing a lot of these enterprise-class tools work so quickly, right out of the box. It’s definitely worth a look for network admins who haven’t found what they’ve been looking for as of yet.

Perspective auto-discovers system resources and their metrics, including: hardware, operating systems, virtualization, databases, middleware, applications, and services. Give it a shot – and that’s the link to use.

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What is the Best Network Management Tool?

Chris Pirillo » perspective

How to Gain Perspective

What is the Best Network Management Tool?