SpikNeT

10 bad habits network administrators should avoid at all costs

10. Poor monitoring discipline

Poor monitoring discipline is an easy habit to pick up, as networks have grown in size, complexity, and geographic distribution, according to Patrick Hubbard, head geek at SolarWinds. The growth of the cloud has also made it more difficult to pinpoint the root causes of performance issues. And often, network admins are siloed from server admins, storage admins, and others, with little cross-discipline monitoring.

"Monitoring across multiple disciplines instead of the traditional silos can provide a cohesive view across an organization's IT spectrum, and thus ridding the bad habit of the old way of monitoring can make root cause analysis much more efficient and accurate, reducing costs in the process," Hubbard said. "For network administrators to be most effective at their job, they need to expand current skillsets to effectively monitor hardware, networks (i.e. NetFlow and syslog), applications, virtualization, configurations, cloud and even containerized workloads."