Main Problems a Network Manager Meets and How to Solve Them Quickly

Working as a network administrator seems to be an interesting work experience. However, it’s also challenging work as there are lots of work tasks to be fulfilled during a standard workday.

If you want to become a network administrator and build a successful career, you need to find out about several main problems that an ordinary network manager may face while fulfilling his work duties.

Problem 1: Bad Knowledge of the Network

If you are going to become an exemplary network manager, you need to plan your daily routine very carefully to fulfill all required tasks exactly on time. How can you do this? Firstly, you need to get an inventory list of things connected to your network.

You may do this either manually or with the help of special software. If you choose the first option, you’ll have to spend a lot of time on tedious and backbreaking work. In addition, there is always a good chance to miss something while wandering around the office.

Our recommendation is to use a special network audit tool that can help you investigate your network more effectively. For instance, you can use Total Network Inventory (TNI).

Using such kind of software gives you a lot of bonuses. Let’s list some of them:

• TNI is easy to install (you just run the setup file and determine the place where the database will be stored);
• TNI deploys all the necessary agents automatically (you don’t need to install them manually);
• There are a number of ways to add tasks to the scanner (IP networks, Windows networks, Active Directory);
• TNI gives you an opportunity to select which computers to skip during scanning and determine the start time of the scanning process;
• TNI is able to generate a complete inventory report that can be sent via email or printed.

Problem 2: Badly Planned Schedule

When you know what is actually connected to your network, it’s high time to plan your daily duties correctly. We recommend you to start with making a general list of duties you have to fulfill during your standard workday. You can do this by collecting data from your emails, phone calls, lunchtime chats and other sources.

After having created a list of work duties, you can proceed with prioritizing and classifying them into three big groups:

• Most important work duties (these are usually various errors that have occurred on the network and have to be fixed as soon as possible);
• Work duties of average importance (this group of tasks often includes software deployment and tasks connected with network infrastructure enhancement);
• Least important duties (these are the tasks connected with various projects aimed at assessing and improving the network performance).

We recommend you to take this classification into consideration while planning your daily routine.

Problem 3: Lack of Time

You won’t find a network manager who hasn’t faced the problem of shortage of time during his career. However, even this problem can be fixed. For instance, you may use special software to automate some of your duties.

In the previous chapter, we’ve discussed the benefits of using an inventory tool for an automated scanning process. You may use similar tools for software deployment and network monitoring.

Today, we have discussed several most widespread problems of network administration and the ways to solve them. We hope that our post will help you manage your network more effectively.