The relationship between network monitoring, storks and Frodo might not be immediately evident, but please read on.
Let’s say, for a moment, that you’re a news source or news organization that hosts your news online.
Is your infrastructure prepared to manage unprecedented amounts of traffic if one of your stories happens to “take off?”
Take for example, a recent MSNBC story, which is fairly sensationalist and will no doubt generate plenty of traffic via the Internet corridors. It is headlined, “Giant Storks May Have Fed on Real-Life Hobbits.”
It makes you want to click on it, right? After all, you clicked on this article to read more about it, didn’t you?
The article itself is pretty fascinating. It discusses the proposed predilection of the giant stork (Leptoptilos robustus) and its habit towards eating small, hobbit-like humans.
Repeat, you say?
Well, according to news sources, fossilized skeletons of a hobbit-like species of human were discovered in 2003 at the Liang Bua cave on the Indonesian island of Flores. In that very same cave were the fossils of giant birds --- those of the aforementioned stork, Leptoptilos robustus (more like Eathobbitus Mightius).
Hanneke Meijer, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, is quoted as saying that the giant birds, “... possibly in principle [ate] even small, juvenile hobbits, although we have no evidence for that. These birds are opportunistic carnivores — if you give them plenty of prey items, they'll hunt all of them."
So let’s say this news becomes an online trend, generating hundreds of thousands of hits. It’s entirely possible, after all – crazier things have occurred.
But have data center and IT personnel considered what could happen to their networks in such a time.
This is why network monitoring solutions are so vital – they can alert staff members when unusual spikes in TCP and UDP (News - Alert) flows are occurring, ensuring that proper attention is drawn to any potential drain on the infrastructure.
After all, any resulting outage would be almost as inconvenient as being a hobbit and getting eaten by a stork!
(To read more about poor Frodo’s demise, feel free to click here…)
Erin Monda recently graduated from W.C.S.U. with a degree in professional writing. She primarily writes about network technologies, including cloud computing, virtualization and network optimization, however she also has a focus on E911 technologies and legislation.
Edited by Erin Monda