Monitoring Software: Six Beyond Big Brother Uses

 Not only privacy advocates, but plenty of IT admins view enterprise-based monitoring software's chief role as checking to see if employees are spending company time looking at Web sites that have nothing to do with your company's mission or sectors.

But in a thought-provoking Computerworld.com piece entitled "Forget Big Brother: seven (actually six, if you don't count employee monitoring) uses for monitoring software you need to kno about, Bert Latamore interviews the American Association of Airport Executives' senior vp of information systems Patrick Osborne about other uses for monitoring software besides what I call "big brothering."

Osborne is a busy guy. He runs three networks- one, a background-checker for the Feds, who want to vette aviation workers for criminal and terrorist links; another network for coordination of training systems at airports throughout the world; and the third for internal management of communications links for the 80-member association staff.

Osborne (a historic name in computing if you've been around as long as I have, but no relation) uses ETelemetry Metron software.

Here's the six "other" uses Osborne cites for the monitoring software he uses:

Aggregating traffic data for smoother traffic levels;

Heading off problems by performing more detailed traffic analysis;

Identifying scheduling problems by tracking usage by time of day;

Finding underused components, for possible removal if the underuse becomes endemic;

Chargebacks, which can be informed by a summary of usage per department;, and

Justifying budget requests for infrastructure improvements. Examples: a new switch or server.