Blinking Lights

I can't believe I never posted this before, but I went to reference it and couldn't find it.  So, if you've heard this before, I'm sorry for being repetitious.

Sometime a number of years back, about the time we were getting ITDiscuss kicked off, a few of us were sitting around a table talking about network monitoring (bandwidth issues) and what tools we used.  There was a lot of silence.  Then somebody (may have been me) sheepishly admitted "I watch the blinkey lights."  Kind of similar to the Roundtable discussion on network monitoring regarding "a lot of calls tells you things are really bad," we sort of all came to the same conclusion -- we look at our switches and use a highly scientific method of determining network traffic:

1. If the lights are all off, that's bad
2. If the lights are on solid, that's also bad
3. If the lights are blinking, not too fast, not too slow, then that's good

Do you use the "blinkey light" method of monitoring your network utilization?

Comments

[Jason Powell]

When our server rack was downstairs in our MDF next to the kitchen, I used to periodically open the door to the tech room, turn off the lights and just watch all the blinks. Staff would walk by giving me odd looks and occasionally actually ask what I was doing just staring into a dark room. I'd tell 'em, "just making sure the network is happy."

[Bradley Dean]

I do check the lights. But HP ProCurve's come with nice web based tools. And I check the SonicWall reports to make sure the top bandwidth users are all who they should be.