The Olympics are well underway right now. Maybe you have caught a favorite event or two. Today, we wanted to share a look at network management and the London 2012 Olympics. This Olympics more than others in the past is seeing network management as a daunting task especially with the increased use of social media.
Brandon Butler of Network World reports that on the first day of competition the Olympics infrastructure was overloaded causing disruption, for example, on GPS tracking during the women’s bicycling race. Many Olympics organizers put out a request to ask spectators to scale back their Twitter use. Network experts point out that the Olympics has shown us on a large-scale the need for big events to have networking and monitoring tools in place in today’s more bandwidth heavy environment.
Mr. Butler adds some highlights regarding the importance of networking tools to prevent communication networks from overload.
- Network monitoring tools allow you to gain insight into the capacity of the network. “Fine-level” monitoring allows you to narrow it down to what type of traffic is causing the stress to the network.
- Not all traffic to the network should be treated the same. Business critical applications need to take priority and there are tools that allow for that management.
