Proactive Network Monitoring - Ensuring Education Comes First

I got to give a presentation yesterday at TCEA2011 in the Systems Administrator Academy. The session was titled: Proactive Network Monitoring - Ensuring that Education Comes First.

Here is the link to my Prezi: http://bit.ly/gPNxGP

The first part of the session was discussing the following tools:

FireGen - A syslog analysis tool (review your routers system logs in a more visual format)

PRTG - A network monitoring tool that will allow you to create ping sensors as well as bandwidth monitors (via SNMP) to proactively monitor the status of your circuits.

Then we moved into a discussion on Content Filtering and how your filter works.

The final section of the discussion (and the most important in my eyes) was based on how you are using all of this information to make more educated discussions about how you are filtering and allowing for more flexible use of the internet. This is an aspect that we must continue to fight for! Our students and teachers need to have access to web 2.0 tools and social media at school in order to learn how to use these tools responsibly.

I also took a few minutes and showed a clip from Alec Couros' TEDx Talk which you can find here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxSyqa6Hpq8

The clip I showed was from the 14 minute mark to about the 17 minute mark. I was hoping to show some of those in attendance the types of things teachers can create when these types of tools are open.

The last thought in my presentation was:

Let's make sure that WE are not the limit to our student's learning!