Scott Pross, Vice President of Technology at Monalytic, a SolarWinds company, and Brett Littrell, Chief Technology Officer of Alum Rock Union School District, discuss real world solutions utilizing school district case studies. Learn how Alum Rock Union School District transformed their aging technical infrastructure into a modern network with SolarWinds to meet the needs of their students and staff.
Corey Baumgartner 00:14
Welcome back to Carahcast the podcast from Carahsoft the trusted government IT solutions provider subscribe to get the latest technology updates in the public sector. I'm Corey Baumgartner, your host from the Carahsoft production team. On behalf of SolarWinds and Carahsoft, we would like to welcome you to today's podcast focused around transforming Alum Rock Union School District's aging technical infrastructure into a modern network capable of meeting the future needs of students and staff. Scott Pross, Vice President of Technology at Monalytic, a solar winds company and Brett Littrell, Chief Technology Officer of Alum Rock Union School District will discuss real world solutions utilizing school district case studies.
Scott Pross00:56
Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Scott Pross. I'm the Vice President of Technology for Monalytic. I've been doing SolarWinds for about 16 years now, I started using SolarWinds, when I had to build a network operation center from the ground up for a billion dollar company, we had a 99.99% customer facing SLA that gave me four minutes and 37 seconds of downtime a month for 33,000 devices. So you might imagine you get pretty good with it when you have that kind of pressure on you. I joined Monalytic With with a professional services firm, so for implementing SolarWinds, about six years ago. And we put together a framework that became very, very effective in implementing SolarWinds. In 12, January, this past year, SolarWinds actually decided to purchase us and we became the professional services arm for SolarWinds. For me, school districts of all and education in general have always been a very important part of my life, because I actually started my career in a school district but not as an IT professional as a psychologist. So I have a very special place in my heart for educational and school facilities and school districts. That's what I want to pass it over to Brett, so that we can learn a little bit about his background and get started with a case study.
Brett Littrell02:14
Thanks, Scott, to kind of give you a little bit of background on myself, I started off in consulting, in the private sector, actually started in Honolulu, Hawaii, where I did some consulting around Honolulu and moved down to the Silicon Valley, where I do consulting around the Bay Area that been to Milpitas Unified School District where I ran the network in it for there for about 15 years. And of course, rebuilding networks was a thing I mean, 15 years doesn't, you don't keep that network for 15 years, I think we rebuilt it like three or four times, and all that good stuff. So lots of experience from that. And then I moved back into the private sector, actually, probably most notably working at a networking company, a global networking company. And I ran their network and security for the entire company worldwide. And then moved into a security company, again, a global security company as well and render it insecurity. Global as well. And so after that I moved back into the public sector here at Air USD and started working with the folks here and, you know, kind of moving the network forward. And yeah, that's pretty much it. It's, I guess what we have in here, like 12 years of private and 16, I never actually calculated it out. But it's been a fun ride for me, not a huge school district. It's about 22 Elementary Middle School. So for K through Eighth District, we have about 500 teachers with the price about another 500 staff on top of that. And so a total of about, let's say 9000 total users in the entire school district. So in we kind of we serve to like the east side of San Jose in Silicon Valley. Some of the challenges when I first started here, and this is kind of coming back from all my experience in previous public sector and then in private sector was the, you know, just coming into it was, you know, the visibility that we really didn't have, and that was probably one of the biggest challenges that I actually ran into. And this is not an unknown challenge. I mean, there's lots of networks, private sector, public sector doesn't matter. You know, they there is a lot of lack of visibility into what's actually happening. So when we when I first got here, it was really interesting because you know, when something And down. The only way we really know about it was if someone actually called in, hey, you know, the internet's down, my phone doesn't work or something to that effect, we send a technician out, and they would look at it and say, oh, you know, the IDF is down, or the MDF staff? Oh, the whole school is down. Who woulda known? Yeah, type thing, you know, where we were at. And so one of the challenges we needed to address was, you know, that visibility, how can we get, get more visibility, and address this issue of trying to get ahead of problems becoming more proactive. And another challenge we ran into is, budget. I mean, this is this is common among school districts, budget is usually tight, and figure things out into and simplify it in my work. And when I try and figure out, you know, what's the difference between private sector and public sector budget wise, and I finally kind of came up with it, you know, when you look at public sector, especially schools, you know, if you were to equate the number of users and the number of computers and the number of switches and devices on the network, to a actual private sector company, you'd be talking about probably a mid level or, you know, large level enterprise company that spends 10s of millions of dollars, if not hundreds of millions of dollars on it, you know, and when you look at a public sector school, maybe you're hitting, you know, about $3 million. And that counts, you know, the what is it the salaries, and so on, so forth. So, you know, one of the biggest constraints for us and challenges is, how do we find a solution that actually, you know, is within our budget, and is able to manage all of these different devices. So, and then, you know, other things, you know, lengthy procurement processes, and then all kinds of ties to how much money things cost, and how much you're gonna be able to manage it, and so on, so forth. And the final thing was the underlying challenge for everything was, where did we want to go? And, you know, the next three years, I built out a strategic plan for the district, but getting there, building it out is one thing, you know, getting there is another thing. And so one of the things that, you know, when we're looking at, you know, what we needed to do was, how are we going to get there, from where we're at today, so. So as far as the decision process for us, it really kind of comes down to looking at the challenges that I just mentioned. And you know, what solution is going to address that? I think this is probably common across all public entities, as well as private, private, you know, you don't have a nailed down process for how you're going to, you know, pick a product or pick a solution, because every solution is, is a response to a challenge that you have. And so those challenges change. So there is no particular process, but you kind of build it as you go. And so, for us, it was looking at the strategic plan, looking at the challenges we have today with, you know, reactive responses, versus trying to move down a proactive response to a lot of these issues. And so, when we're looking at solutions, you know, as far as what was going to work for us, you know, one of the aspects is okay, you know, we can buy piecemeal solutions, which I am totally fine with, you know, if they're affordable, and you know, if they're gonna do a good job. But we started looking at other solutions, what we're finding is, at least as far as compared to SolarWinds, was there about the same, you know, if not, you know, solar winds is better. And it's, you know, it's as far as a total package is a lot more budget friendly for us to take in. And so, so we kind of gain a lot of things with it, we get that single pane of glass, which is great. But we also get a very good product for the things that we wanted to define. So one solution we ended up going with was Network Configuration Manager, Network Performance Monitor.
Brett Littrell09:52
He mapper and Log Analyzer. And one of the strategic plan that we were with that we're looking at is read built the entire architecture now we're moving from basically an open network where you plug into the network, and you have access to just about everything to a segmented, secure role based network. And so how do we do that across 100? IDs? You know, how do we do that across, you know, the multiple head and switches and the MDF and, and make this standard space. So we're like, every, every single switch is the same, because, again, we don't have that ability to have a network engineer at every single site like enterprise company would, you know, we have a certain limited number of folks. So. So one of the challenges, you know, for the solution is, is that, you know, we need to be able to do this in mass in scale, and be able to push this out. And so the Network Configuration Manager from SolarWinds, is extremely helpful for that. Because not only are we able to pull in all of our switches and stacks of switches and, and pull that configuration in and backup, the configuration on all that stuff. The really important part, the one that fits our challenges was to be able to push out a consistent configuration to each and every one of those stacks. So we know that if if 802 dot 1x, which is what we're using to segment these networks, you know, is working on one switch, we can reliably push this out to multiple switches, and ensure that if it's if that switch is capable of doing it, and there's not an issue with that switch, it's actually going to work the way it works on every other single switch. Before this, what was happening was we would go into each and every switch, we would make a configuration change. You know, and you know, someone may fat finger something, someone may, you missed something here missed something there. And so we had a lot of inconsistencies across it, that may not have been an inconsistency that was readily apparent right away, because maybe we weren't testing for certain something at that time. But it became apparent, it will become apparent later. Or maybe it just be a nuisance like, you know, it has this username and password to log in. And then this other switch has this other user name, password, to login, and so on. So we wanted to kind of remove all of these differences is in the switches and the networking in general. So we have a very consistent means to manage this, which then reduces the amount of work everybody has to do, and the number of engineers you have to have, and so on and so forth. Do this aside was the Network Performance Monitor. And this part is kind of getting us to that more proactive side, again, like I mentioned before, yeah, when I first got here, it was like, when we, you know, DOJ, we found out about a problem was, we get a phone call that something was down, and then we would go investigate it. And that's very reactive, it's always reactive when you're doing that. But if you know, now, when we get Performance Monitor, once we got that installed, it was like, within a couple of weeks to a month, we had a good list of stuff like stacking cables, you know, you know, stacking cables that, you know, are no longer connected or fat or, or coming up with errors, you know, SFPs that are still working, but the light levels are very low. So you know, we're moving into that more proactive mode, where we're actually going out there and replacing those before they go out. So it makes it much better so that we're not just reacting every time that something goes offline. We're actually getting out there and fixing it before it becomes a problem when we have some downtime from the user. Phyllis, I was like, oh, go ahead.
Scott Pross14:23
Well, I was just gonna say, you know, this is something we see with a lot of our customers and I'm really glad you brought it up is that consistency with no network configuration manager, you know, we call that a homogeneous environment. And just like you want to try to keep all your configurations the same. within that environment, you want to keep your monitoring the same. So all of your switches are monitored the exact same way with a network performance manager. It makes the care and feeding of SolarWinds itself much easier. But getting that consistency where you're you have all of your main lines of the configuration that can be The theme is possible, it makes your life so much easier. So completely agree with where you're heading. And we see that with all of our customers, whether they're, you know, in education, they're in the military, or they're in the federal government. So great point there.
Brett Littrell15:15
Yeah, and it's kind of funny, because, you know, in the private sector, you know, a lot of times, and I hate to say this, but you know, I mean, a lot of times in companies that aren't necessarily IT companies, you know, their, their solution to everything is just, you know, throw more money at, you know, okay, you know, we'll we'll work around it by throwing more money at it. And what I've seen, and I've worked at quite a few smaller or midsize, or even larger companies around Silicon Valley, is that, you know, that they tend to not fix the underlying problem. And the underlying problem is usually an underlying architecture old standardization problem, where, you know, each and every switch, or each and every router is configured differently, you know, and so you have a really hodgepodge network, and instead of fixing the underlying problem, they end up just getting ways to work around it. And so the underlying problem never goes away, you know, it just, you spend more and more money to be able to work around it. And that's, that was one of the probably most frustrating things in the private industry was coming from the public sector at m usd, where, you know, I was like, the only person managing the network for a good amount of time, that didn't have the option of, you know, having these underlying problems, I didn't have the budget to work around it, I didn't have the time to work around it. So I had to find a way that, you know, would actually work where we could have good, reliable network access. And the solution was, you know, standardization, making sure everything's consistent. And we use SolarWinds, back then to, you know, it was configuration manager was a huge part of implementation at MUSC, as well, just like we're doing here. So you might continue to continue on, like network topology manager. One of the things that is very interesting with this one, and I'll clinical back to a different company, this is a company I was working for, where I, that was a security company, and we were implementing a spine and leaf architecture, you know, both in our labs and in our, our in architecture. And one of the really interesting things with this older lands, topology manager, was, you know, when we built out the, the switches, we placed the switches, you know, if you go into solar winds, you can, you can place it on a map, and you can place his switches here and there, and you can have it whatever you want. But we placed it in the ways that we visualize, you know, that architecture. And so I remember placing it in there, and one of the very cool things was, you know, you can do that layer two layer three button that actually connects all the layer two, layer three connections between the devices. And you can tell quite readily if you haven't misconfigured, because it won't look like your actual configuration, you know, the way the architecture you plan it to be. And so, it's always fun when you build out that, and it actually comes out, right, you know, and you actually see these connections being made between all the different devices. And if you don't know spine and leaf, it's, you know, there's a lot of cross connects between the spine and the cross connects between the, the leaf objects, and so on, so forth. So it's always fun to see them. But the other thing that's fun about it or nice about it is, if you mess something up, and you re you haven't reanalyze it, it'll actually show you exactly where you messed it up. I mean, because it'll show like that link disappeared, or it went to this other switch, and so on, so forth. So, you know, again, in a school district, it makes a lot of sense, because we have a lot of interconnected devices and making sure that we're actually connecting to those things. We're not connecting through another switch along the way, and so on, so forth. So, you know, that was very handy. And finally, the Log Analyzer from our perspective, this was one of those things, if you go out and buy a Syslog server, you know, we could have paid for a fairly cheap syslog server, about the same as what we pay for SolarWinds. Yeah, for all of this stuff. And so it was like kind of a no brainer, it's like, okay, well, and I'm not going to sit here and tell you that SolarWinds is the most fantastic Log Analyzer in the world is not. But, you know, it's, it's a Log Analyzer that's actually fairly easy to navigate and search for stuff. And we can point all of our stuff, too. Yeah, and so we have a record off of the device itself. So if someone hacks into the device, and deletes the logs, you know, we actually have an off device analyzer that we can actually see that's happening. So, so it kind of added in additional features that, you know, maybe we wouldn't even thought of at that time. But we're actually ended up using that, as far as benefits gained, you know, the, there's so much that we ended up utilizing it SolarWinds. And one of them I forgot to even touch on previously. But you know, the fact that we can push out this configuration, we built Manage Scripts, to push out the configuration to all these different switches, and making sure that those are all consistent. So what we ended up doing for, say, our 802 dot 1x deployment is we have scripts that are pre pre made by us. And it's really easy to make it, it's just basically executing the commands or doing the commands that you would do at the command. And, you know, we just have those setup for the different switches that we want to, you know, for like a certain model a switch off, it's a 3750, Cisco 3750,
Brett Littrell21:44
we just push it out, you know, as to all the 3750s. And all of those 3750s are, guess what, on the same firmware, because we're able to do that also with SolarWinds, you know, so instead of kind of going through each IDF and doing the archive, download software, and whatever that Cisco update, way you want to do it, we actually just pushed that out via solar winds, and had, you know, all of our switches move consistently to the right firmware version, or the firmware version we want to use. And we do that across all the models of switches. And so now we're able to actually take those configurations, and we're relatively assured that, you know, those configurations are going to work across all of our 3750s, all of our across all of our 4500s, and so on so forth, because when we built those, we built it on the firmware that was pushed out to all these different devices. So that consistency, again, kind of keeps coming back. And, and that has saved us a lot of time, you know, moving forward, because now we're testing, you know, we can test on one switch, or we can test on a couple of switches, and make sure that you know, things are working, right, like when someone logs in, do they get placed onto the correct network, you know, is that network getting the correct IP address? Instead of you know, troubleshooting all of that all the time trying to figure out where you made a mistake on this idea versus at IDF has helped us save a huge amount of time. One of the other things that we also got along with our existing SolarWinds deployment was the NetFlow analyzer, a flow data analyzer. I didn't talk about that, because actually, I don't think it was actually on the slide. But I did want to touch on that. Because you know, that one is very critical for actually seeing the existing network traffic that's happening on your network, not just seeing if it switches down or not just seeing if there's a hardware failure or imminent hardware failure, but actually seeing what's happening on the network. And I love this because, you know, I go back to when I worked at that networking company, because the networking company I worked at, made load balancers, and they also made DDoS products that would, you know, deflect DDoS. And we had, like, 116, rack, lab area, that thing was huge. And all these engineers, you know, they had all these packet generators that were pumping packets into the network, into the lab network. And every once in a while you'd have an engineer make a mistake and start pumping that network traffic into the corporate network. And so, you know, before we had SolarWinds, air and flow analyzer, we would actually it would take about a couple of hours for us to track down Who's the acing us, you know, internally, and even sometimes we would actually have DoS attacks running outside because in the lab that would actually use internet routable addresses. And so sometimes that would actually leak out to the internet. So we implemented the NetFlow analyzer in there. And it literally reduced our time to, to track down and mitigate those DoS attacks to from like, two hours to like five minutes. And I'm not, I'm not, you know, elaborating on any this exam exaggerating on any of this either. It literally Yeah, when we get a call, Hey, you know, network looks, Yeah, seems a little slow, we would go into solar winds, look at where the big spike in traffic is, from the NetFlow. And we will see exactly what network is coming from, we would, the time it would take would be us launching putty get into the switch, where that VLAN is and shutting down the VLAN. And that was the end of the DoS attack. Whereas before, we would, you know, see it in the firewall and see it hit Eric course, which we'd have to track it back to the core switch of the lab, and we'd have to track it back to the edge switch of these devices, and all that stuff that made it so much simpler. In educational space, we see similar things, granted, you're probably not going to see a kid executing DoS attacks or DDoS attacks to minute too much on the internal network, although I wouldn't put it past them. You know, you do see slowdowns. And you see issues where, you know, you just can't explain it today. You know, like, if you don't have that visibility, you don't know why, you know, going to this one, going out to the network at this one site is is slow. You know, it may be that someone's downloading a video game, you know, and for some reason, it's taking up all the bandwidth, but you don't really know. Because you can't, you don't have that visibility. So that was another product, we actually got the NetFlow analyzer, and that actually helps us helps a lot with actually figuring out how to optimize your network and where issues are lying. So your
Scott Pross27:25
brain, you're really raised here, because this is something we see all the time as well, where you have students that are bringing their iPads to school, they're they're logging into the utilizing the Wi Fi, now you're able to get an idea of you know, what is their traffic patterns look like? Where are they going on the internet? Are they going to play some that they shouldn't be going is everybody trying to use Spotify or Netflix and although a lot of the school districts now have filters into prevent those kinds of things, you know, you can't tell I've actually installed NTA on school district networks. And all of a sudden, we found out that they were doing the students were running big torrents and downloading illegal movies and that kind of stuff, using it. So it's a phenomenal tool that allows you to really get an idea of not only how your particular network is using the traffic, but also how your students using the traffic has to be helpful.
Brett Littrell28:23
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And, you know, to be honest, when, when I worked at MUSC, we also had it there and it was the same same thing. Yeah, we would actually utilize that to see what was going on. So. So it is definitely relevant in the educational side, as well. So as far as advice, I would I would say there's always a lot of advice in to give to folks, you know, every every place is different, though. So it is kind of tough, you got to do what you feel is best for your school district or you got to do what's best for your company. It's always changing. However, what I found in a very general sense is try to make things agnostic, you know, don't tie it into a vendor. That's one thing I do like about solar winds is, you know, if we have Cisco switches or we have Juniper switches, or we have Arista switches or ruckus or Aruba. Yeah. You know, it works across all of those. So it's not like, I remember when we first got SolarWinds the competitor with Cisco works in there, we call it Cisco quirks. But, you know, it really only worked for Cisco and even then a lot of people that I heard from I've never actually used it, Tony Yeah, it's really kind of wacky. So, you know, and SolarWinds was pretty straightforward. Yeah. And it was across not just Cisco, but all these other switch vendors as well. In when it comes to being agnostic, you know, it actually lends itself to helping in a lot of other areas as well. So it gives you a, for instance, when I was at m usd, after a certain amount of time, we really stuck to standards, you know, we didn't care about, you know, the next cool thing that Cisco had, or the next cool thing that Juniper had, if it wasn't a standard, we wouldn't implement it. And the reason was, is that we wanted to be able to take things out of the network and put something else in so that we didn't have to be stuck with an okay product from this one company, because we got all these other products that were pretty good for them, you know, we wanted to be able to implement, now best of breed product that maybe, you know, hopefully costs as much or cheaper than the other one and be able to just, you know, place it into the network and have it take over, you know, whatever aspect it may be. And that, for instance, is the, yeah, we did 802 dot 1x. C, as well. So, you know, we had the Cisco IV, leave it with ACS server there. And so we use that for our radius server. Well, radius is a standard, it's about 1x as a standard. And so when the ACS server stopped working for us, you know, because of Microsoft, changing their clients and all that stuff, we moved to free radius. And it was, it was no change on anything other than, you know, we had to make sure that free radius was actually working. And it was, you know, pushing out the VLANs that we want it to for, you know, 2.1x. But we were able to interchange those devices, that same was true with the firewalls, and the proxy servers that we had, we stuck to standards for each one of those. And we can interchange those devices as needed. So we're kind of stuck into the Cisco side of things. And what I've seen in private industry is, yeah, once you go down that rabbit hole, it becomes very hard to break out of it. If you're, you know, in a proprietary solution. Like, for instance, one company I worked at, they did 802, dot 1x, eight, they got ice, Cisco company, all Cisco, they love Cisco, which is great, because Cisco is a good company. But, you know, they had ice and all this stuff. And they never really implemented network segmentation. You know, and by the time, you know, after three years of having ice do nothing on the network, Cisco came along, and oh, hey, we got this new thing called trust sec, it's even better than, you know, 2.1x, you know, but then you start looking at it. And it's only works on Cisco switches, which is great for them. But if they ever wanted to add anything, it makes it very hard to break out of that. Not that you can, you can probably fanatical trust sec, you know, by redoing translation rules and all that good stuff, but it becomes a lot harder. And so trying to stay away from those proprietary solutions and trying to stick to standard state agnostic as possible, is probably the biggest advice I would give anybody, you know, when they're building networks, or building new networks, or what have you. So and then, I suppose lessons learned. This is kind of a ironic one. So as far as I know, and maybe this is not true. But Cisco came up with the NetFlow ideas, flow data, metadata of network traffic, yet, most of their switches don't support it, or at least a lot of their edge switches and all that stuff. don't support it. I came from the private industry where there's a lot of juniper, there's an Arista, you know, ruckus and all that stuff. And all those support S flow or J flow or NetFlow. And all that. So when when we got the flow portion for SolarWinds here, I'm looking at the switches and they don't support NetFlow, which was like I said, ironic, but I'm not I'm not sore about ordering, you know, getting that portion with it. Because I know we're going to be changing the switches out to switches that do support NetFlow. So now like maybe we just support NetFlow on the core because that's those are the switches that can handle If, eventually this is going to be at the edge, as well. And so, yeah, lessons learned there, it's probably a learned lesson I learned a long time ago, and I just forgot, again is, you know, make sure, you know, all your stuff actually works with that. As far as anything I would do differently. As far as when it comes to SolarWinds? No. I have to say, from the start, once we implemented SolarWinds, you know, we started seeing, you know, things that we need to take care of right away, you know, we start moving directly into that proactive mentality where we're fixing stuff before it breaks. So from my perspective, it was a very successful implementation. The biggest problem, I would say that you may find, is a man something, and this, this goes along with security as well. And I think just gonna equate this to security, because, you know, it's very similar. If you go out and get a pen test done. Yeah. And I always tell this to people, what good is that gonna do if there's no one there to fix anything, you know, if you go on, it's going to tell you, you have all these vulnerabilities type thing. But if you don't have someone to go and actually fix those things, then all it is is no more chaff, more more worry for you to deal with. I'm not saying not to do pen tests, I'm saying, You got to make sure when you do this stuff, you actually execute and make sure that you take care of it. And so, you know, with solar winds, you know, we were fortunate enough, we had the manpower to be able to go out and execute on and fixing the issues that we were, we were seeing and making sure we were moving down that proactive path. So now that we have more time from from missing that reactive side of things, we're able to actually start implementing more and more things to improve the network over time. So
Scott Pross37:14
I'll jump I'll jump in here, because we've had a couple of questions come in regarding the size of your network. How many elements? Do you have any additional polars? Can you give us just an idea of the size of your actual monitoring environment? Are you actually do you know, how many elements you have? And do you know if you have any digital power?
Brett Littrell37:34
Yeah, so we have about just guesstimating here, but about probably about 100 stacks of switches, each of those stacks may have anywhere from you know, two to nine or 10? Well by nine switches in them. But you know, they're managed as a single switch. And then of course, we have hit N switches, which are, you know, by themselves. And so that's probably another 20 to one per site, and then of course, internal servers, and so on. So I would probably say overall, we're probably looking at two or 300 devices, we don't have any additional polars. You know, we were just using the politics built into solid Windsor at the moment. Although I, I could see actually using that. I mean, that would be kind of nice. But yeah, I don't think there's too much else to that at this point. Now, that will be going up, though. That will, that will be going up as we move away from stacks in the in the IDs and stuff, we're going to be moving to individual switches, you know, that number is going to go out. So it may be that we're going to need an individual another polar, but at this point, just fine. Yeah, I mean, I don't, I don't think I've seen any issues with delays on this little men's side.
Scott Pross39:03
And that's great. That's great. You know, one of the things we love is the the ability to put up the additional poles. And if you need to add some of these school districts, you don't necessarily want all the points go across the wire all the time. So you can put an additional poll at different locations as well for polling. So we're seeing more and more of that as well. But it's good to hear one of the other questions we just got is are there any local state or federal guidelines that were fulfilled since upgrading your SolarWinds tools that you were required to me?
Brett Littrell39:41
Not that I knew of the no one actually mentioned that to me. We didn't actually upgrade our solar winds tools we actually implemented some of the winds so we we upgraded course and as we go along, to make sure we're at the latest version, but as far as guidelines, I would say the guidelines that are kind of ancillary to this is, you know, like security guidelines, you know, being able to implement segmented networks and role based access, you know, falls along like NIST guidelines and all that stuff, which also follows along, you know, being able to, you know, reduce the insurance and cybersecurity insurance and all that stuff that we currently pay, in case we get hacked into, because now we can prove that, you know, we segment things and we do all that stuff, which is all, not directly SolarWinds. But is is enabled through SolarWinds. Because we're able to actually do this and mass.
Scott Pross40:46
Excellent. Now, that may make a lot of sense. As far as your your actual, your the way that you're doing things right now, are you seeing that you plan to integrate SolarWinds with other other tools, such as a ticketing system or anything, any plans for that in the future,
Brett Littrell41:08
then to be honest, our ticketing system is is kind of more geared on the facility side. So probably not on a ticketing system, we are always looking for ways to integrate different services, you know, so you know, I do know that we were looking at Oh, website, uptime, so uptime for different school sites, and so on so forth, and exporting that and getting that connected to our external website server. So we can have a static, semi static way of updating that the status of the network in general. So if someone wants to know if one of our school sites is down, they can go in there and actually see that that's still in process, we've had just so much other stuff going on, we haven't been able to build that in. So
Scott Pross42:09
you know, I always tell people, especially in the school districts, you start off with simple automation. Sometimes it's as simple as just restarting a service. When it goes, when the service goes down it, it stem realizes that the service is going down, using a tool to restart a service, start small and then expand outward. A lot of people aren't using the ticketing piece, we see that quite a bit. But so many of these tools now can can be integrated together to talk with each other. And simply pulling the status from SolarWinds, as far as a website up or down, can be very, very helpful for the end users.
Brett Littrell42:45
Exactly, exactly. So I see one question here. Why are we moving from stacks to individual switches? If you don't mind, I was just gonna answer that real fast. It's kind of funny, because I have a very, very bad history with stacks, I don't think there's ever been a stack that I liked. Mostly because, you know, it just adds additional headache, when when there shouldn't have to be any additional headache. And what I mean by that is, if we look at SolarWinds Configuration Manager, okay, you can just as easily push out a config to 10 switches as if you logged into their stack that had 10 switches hidden and execute the command down way. The difference being is add on stack switches, you know, if one of the switches goes out, and I've had this happen before, you know, it could take down the whole stack, it's not supposed to, but it could, when you want to replace it, it becomes can become a big issue, if you need to upgrade the firmware. Typically the entire stack has to take be taken down. So you know, an entire wing may be taken down versus maybe you know if you can do it, you know, system by system. And I know there's ways you can have it, reboot, one after the other and all that good stuff. But it never seems to ever work quite the way you want it to, at least in my experience. And it's unfortunately, it's been every single stack vendor. Every single single vendor that's you know, had a stack has some kind of issue even like Juniper, I remember we had when I worked for the networking company, they had this huge Juniper stack. And I researched it and I did everything that I thought I was supposed to do. And I just had to add one switch to it. And that one switch corrupted the entire stack which shut down all of engineering. And I was just like, what happened and I'm like, let's plug this one switch in, you know, and so it's kind of about you know, reducing the scope of potential With downtime, you know, if if you have that single point of failure, which is that one stack that's going to manage the entire building, and you don't gain the benefit of that configuration side of it, you know, it's not that significant to you, because you're able to push it out through a SolarWinds Configuration Manager. It makes a lot of sense to not have that extra
Corey Baumgartner 45:25
point of failure. Thanks for listening and thank you to our guests, Scott Pross and Brett Littrell. Don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe to Kara cast and be sure to listen to our other discussions. If you'd like more information on how Carahsoft or solar winds can assist your organization, please visit www.carahsoft.com or email us at solar winds@carahsoft.com. Thanks again for listening and have a great day.