August 2005 — Applications
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Doing More With Less
Among the first things SSI’s CTO Cory Martin identified were two variants of the Sasser worm that had infected Worth County’s network, unbeknownst to us. He quickly recommended appropriate action.
A Newfound Visibility
The NP-500’s deep probing into the response times of application components revealed the cause of application slowdowns. Furthermore, the fact that the appliance’s rich mix of charts, tables, topology maps—as well as both automatic and programmed alerts—can be accessed using a Java desktop application, allows us to troubleshoot problems from anywhere. This end-to-end view saves us a lot of time since we typically don’t have to go out to the school in question to figure out what’s happening.
The NP-500 showed us how much of the district’s bandwidth was being eaten by non-educational applications such as AOL Instant Messenger and Gnutella. We could also see students trying to bypass our Internet filtering using proxy sites, and by using the classroom logs, we were able to identify the students who were responsible. Students now know that they’re no longer invisible on the Internet when they’re using school computers. It’s like giving the teachers in our computer labs eyes in back of their heads—something that’s needed for our job anyway!
The appliance’s ability to group network traffic by school, lab, or other logical division using IP addresses, or applications by port, is a critical part of network monitoring. By dragging these groups into the NetSensory Topology window, we can immediately identify all traffic between the groups and the Internet. Filtering by application identifies what is running on the network; drilling down through the top “talkers” shows who they are,where they’re going, and how much bandwidth they’re using.
Going forward, we anticipate improving our network security with the information furnished by the NP-500. SSI is helping us design security zones to segment administrative, educational, lab, and other users so there’s no physical way to access the wrong resources. The real-time and historical data from the NetSensory appliance let us see actual traffic relationships between these groups, and will enable us to track the effect of the routing as we implement it.
Pam Haney is assistant technology director for Worth County Schools, where she also teaches first grade. She holds a master’s and an educational specialist degree in education from Valdosta State University in Georgia.
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