But they're customers, so my throwing things around wouldn't be appreciated. Instead, in response to complaints about network slowdowns, I simply ask a few questions concerning bandwidth numbers on specific WAN links, latency numbers from the switches, or even just CPU utilization numbers off the servers.

When I don't get an answer, I can dig up that big green documentation notebook I left behind during the UAT (after blowing the dust off it, of course) and point to that section on Things To Do Going Forward. That little part in there on deploying desktop, network and server monitoring tools.

This one client of mine didn't completely ignore that advice, but what it deployed was Ipswitch's WhatUp Gold -- a real nice package, but one that's mainly famous for basic up/down end-node device monitoring. The software actually can do some bandwidth and network health monitoring, but when we get called in for emergency work, we like to use what we know, not eat the learning curve on something new.

For us, that used to be MRTG (http://mrtg.hdl.com/mrtg.html) (Multi Router Traffic Grapher), but lately we've turned to Cacti (http://cacti.net/index.php). A big reason is it's free. A second reason is it's pretty quick to set up. It also delivers its information via color graphs that are easy to show to clients for proper effect. Writing down "100% server CPU utilization" for example, doesn't have nearly the impact of showing a graph that jumps to 100 from 15 with a big red pointer. Nifty.

Cacti gets this advantage from a technology called Round Robin Database (RRD). This system stores and displays time-sensitive data in Cacti's MySQL database. The information expands over time, but Cacti stores it in such a way as to keep storage requirements extremely low. The result is those sexy graphs with very little overhead required to run the app.