Sometimes being in the computer networking business can be a challenge. Oh sure we’ve all heard the help desk support horror stories of how the end-user was using their CD-ROM as a cup holder. That’s not what I’m taking about here though. What I am talking about is the challenges associated with running the back room operations of a computer networking business.

For example we use a product called NetIQ to monitor many of the computer networking functions of our customers. NetIQ has produced network monitoring software for computer networking for quite some time. Some things get better with age and experience. Apparently the NetIQ software doesn’t fit into this category.

You’d think as one of the pioneers of monitoring for the computer networking business that the product would have a modicum of stability. Yet we find ourselves fighting problems every single day.

As an example every day some of the jobs that are set to monitor some of our computer networks stop running. We can’t figure out why but even worse NetIQ can’t figure out why. Every day we have to go into the product and manually restart the jobs. This may seem more an inconvenience than a major problem but it is a major problem as we are monitoring multiple customers with stringent service level agreements in place. This is just one of multiple problems we are currently having with the software.

Hey NetIQ I’d be awfully worried about Systems Management Center if I were you…