Network Reporting and Troubleshooting

It is an unfortunate fact of life that network security is only glamorous to geeks. For everyone else, seeing an IDS purr away, or watching swatch grind through gigabytes of log messages is pretty dull, and more importantly, meaningless. There will inevitably be occasions where you need to demonstrate the state of your network to a less-technical audience. In some cases you need to justify a recent expense, in other cases you may need to provide support for a proposed expense. It is at these times that some useful tools to help turn the bits and bytes into graphs can go a long way. We will discuss several such tools in this tutorial, and how they can be useful in your day-to-day activities.