I subscribe to the Business DSL service from Speakeasy.net for my home DSL. My DSL service is important to my business because it is the primary link to my data centers. I recently upgraded the service to 3 Mb/s and since the upgrade the line has been flapping. My monitoring console showed me that in the course of a day the circuit would flap 4 to 5 times, occurring in bursts. The longest outage wasn’t very long, just 3-5 minutes, but it was extremely irritating: I lost a blog entry I was writing for this blog over a web-based client! I called Speakeasy to discuss the problem with them and they told me that they could not monitor my circuit because it is provisioned through AT&T. I reminded them that they had an SLA with me, to which they agreed. So I said to the representative, how is your SLA enforced? He told me that I had to do my own monitoring, and I had to give them the details on when my circuit was down, and then they would credit my account.

This is a classic example of how service providers sell based on SLA, but because of limitations and corner cases and glitches, can’t always deliver on what’s promised. This is one of the reasons I decided to get into the network monitoring business – I wanted to provide this information to other people and empower them in their relationships with their service providers.

You may have a comprehensive network security plan in place, together with an extensive investment in security hardware and critical configuration information for your network. However, unless you have bulletproof change management and verification processes in place, your staff may inadvertently alter the configurations of critical equipment in the course of day-to-day maintenance or roll-outs. Even with these processes in place, it is possible that your staff can make mistakes, or critical security hardware can fail. In these cases, if security is compromised, you may not know of the problem until someone has penetrated your network and caused damage.

An automated periodic security audit service will give you visibility to changes in your network and applications configuration that have unintended security consequences before these weaknesses can be exploited. The audit consist of an automated scan for known vulnerabilities in your networking and application environments, with results reported to you on a regular basis.

One of our clients with multiple offices throughout California outsourced their network to AT&T. As part of their contract, AT&T provided a Service Level Agreement to them stating that they would notify the client within a short time window when a network outage occurred. The client's network engineer inadvertently discovered that the network for a remote office had been down all weekend. When he called in on Monday, AT&T did not know about the problem.

Most of us have had the experience of being ignored or forgotten by our telecommunication providers. However, if your enterprise has mission-critical IT needs, you can't really afford this kind of treatment from your provider. If this customer had been using our monitoring service with SLA verification, we would have been on the phone with AT&T within minutes of the service outage, assuring that the network was returned to service in as short a time as possible and making sure it was available when the client's staff arrived for work on Monday morning.