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Battling Network Zombies This Halloween?

Megan Assarrane

On Halloween, there's no shortage of horror movies to scare and entertain you. Among the usual cast of creepy characters, zombies are among the most popular underdogs. They're (often) embarrassingly slow and brainless. They have terrible personal hygiene. They can't operate machinery of any kind, they can't drive and they don't know how to use a computer or a smartphone.

Image removed.

Speaking of technology, network zombies, on the other hand, are an all too real menace for the modern-day IT administrator. They are smarter than the average zombie, impossible to predict because they appear randomly without warning and dangerous because they cause downtime and lost productivity. Without the right approach, they are nearly impossible to locate and kill.

Network Zombies Are Real

The process required to detect and eliminate network zombies is far more challenging than the swift headshot that eradicates their human counterparts. Network zombies are much harder to track down and kill because they often appear, wreak havoc and disappear. There's no trail of abandoned vehicles and half-eaten bodies to follow.

The only trace evidence is captured in event logs that are often buried in large volumes of hard to connect data. The root cause can be hidden almost anywhere because most business applications are complex entities that interact with multiple resources, such as databases, web servers, directory services and the network itself. That complexity forces the administrator through a slow, labor-intensive investigative process that can delay other daily tasks and projects.

Without a clear view of the zombie, the system administrator is forced to review event logs from every part of the application environment, analyzing long lists of events in multiple logs item by item to find an outstanding event, error condition, or combination of conditions that correlate to the timeframe in which users began to complain. The process can take many hours, if not weeks.

Hunting for Zombies Doesn't Have to be Hard – Using the Yools You Have

The greatest challenge in hunting zombies is where to begin. Is the zombie in an application, database or web server? Or is it a network issue? Without a valid starting point, there is no way to select the right diagnostic path and conduct an efficient hunt.

Effective Application Performance Monitoring (APM) can overcome this impasse by linking all application dependencies. Most organizations have a tool already in place to do this, but it is often underused or even overlooked as a tool for battling zombies. If used well, targeted, real-time monitoring puts administrators on the right diagnostic path, while clear graphic displays make it easy to follow that path to find the zombies causing the problems.

APM uses application profiles to locate and identify zombies. Application profiles define how an application is monitored and what actions should be taken when an application or one of its components fails. The most useful APM tools also define complex relationships and dependencies – from simple n-tier applications to large server farms to complete IT services.

In a SQL server farm, an application profile can be created to monitor each SQL server instance for zombies. Individual profiles can then be embedded into a higher-level profile to monitor the entire SQL server farm. Once the server farm profile is created, it can be embedded into an even higher-level profile that encompasses the entire service it is part of, such as CRM.

Replicating this process for each IT service component creates a comprehensive service profile to hunt and trap network zombies. The profile ensures the administrator can view the status of the entire service or drill down to any component within that service, to a specific instance or component of an application.

The resulting comprehensive service monitoring profile is the foundation for fast, accurate zombie eradication. Completing a service profile generally takes less than two hours but after that small investment in time, the process of hunting zombies can be collapsed from hours, days and weeks of time into a straightforward process that takes just minutes. If you multiply this by the number of zombie complaints an administrator receives, the amount of time saved could be considerable.

Expanding APM capabilities to the network can also help an administrator to identify the root cause of a network zombie attack easily.

Greater Protection Against the Zombie Menace

Once zombies have been caught, system administrators can use APM to create multi-step action zombie traps to address future invasions more quickly. Traps can include event logging, real-time alerts and PowerShell self-healing scripts such as reboot and service restart. Setting zombie trap policies can be assigned at the service, application and component level. Dependency-aware application profiles enable coordinated multi-tier zombie traps to ensure optimal performance of complex applications and IT services.

An APM tool can streamline the process of hunting and trapping zombies, whether they reside in a device or in the network itself, from many hours of exhausting work into a few highly-productive minutes.

Now there's a weapon people confronted with shuffling zombies in a horror film might wish they had at their disposal.

Megan Assarrane is Product Marketing Manager at Ipswitch.

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Battling Network Zombies This Halloween?

Megan Assarrane

On Halloween, there's no shortage of horror movies to scare and entertain you. Among the usual cast of creepy characters, zombies are among the most popular underdogs. They're (often) embarrassingly slow and brainless. They have terrible personal hygiene. They can't operate machinery of any kind, they can't drive and they don't know how to use a computer or a smartphone.

Image removed.

Speaking of technology, network zombies, on the other hand, are an all too real menace for the modern-day IT administrator. They are smarter than the average zombie, impossible to predict because they appear randomly without warning and dangerous because they cause downtime and lost productivity. Without the right approach, they are nearly impossible to locate and kill.

Network Zombies Are Real

The process required to detect and eliminate network zombies is far more challenging than the swift headshot that eradicates their human counterparts. Network zombies are much harder to track down and kill because they often appear, wreak havoc and disappear. There's no trail of abandoned vehicles and half-eaten bodies to follow.

The only trace evidence is captured in event logs that are often buried in large volumes of hard to connect data. The root cause can be hidden almost anywhere because most business applications are complex entities that interact with multiple resources, such as databases, web servers, directory services and the network itself. That complexity forces the administrator through a slow, labor-intensive investigative process that can delay other daily tasks and projects.

Without a clear view of the zombie, the system administrator is forced to review event logs from every part of the application environment, analyzing long lists of events in multiple logs item by item to find an outstanding event, error condition, or combination of conditions that correlate to the timeframe in which users began to complain. The process can take many hours, if not weeks.

Hunting for Zombies Doesn't Have to be Hard – Using the Yools You Have

The greatest challenge in hunting zombies is where to begin. Is the zombie in an application, database or web server? Or is it a network issue? Without a valid starting point, there is no way to select the right diagnostic path and conduct an efficient hunt.

Effective Application Performance Monitoring (APM) can overcome this impasse by linking all application dependencies. Most organizations have a tool already in place to do this, but it is often underused or even overlooked as a tool for battling zombies. If used well, targeted, real-time monitoring puts administrators on the right diagnostic path, while clear graphic displays make it easy to follow that path to find the zombies causing the problems.

APM uses application profiles to locate and identify zombies. Application profiles define how an application is monitored and what actions should be taken when an application or one of its components fails. The most useful APM tools also define complex relationships and dependencies – from simple n-tier applications to large server farms to complete IT services.

In a SQL server farm, an application profile can be created to monitor each SQL server instance for zombies. Individual profiles can then be embedded into a higher-level profile to monitor the entire SQL server farm. Once the server farm profile is created, it can be embedded into an even higher-level profile that encompasses the entire service it is part of, such as CRM.

Replicating this process for each IT service component creates a comprehensive service profile to hunt and trap network zombies. The profile ensures the administrator can view the status of the entire service or drill down to any component within that service, to a specific instance or component of an application.

The resulting comprehensive service monitoring profile is the foundation for fast, accurate zombie eradication. Completing a service profile generally takes less than two hours but after that small investment in time, the process of hunting zombies can be collapsed from hours, days and weeks of time into a straightforward process that takes just minutes. If you multiply this by the number of zombie complaints an administrator receives, the amount of time saved could be considerable.

Expanding APM capabilities to the network can also help an administrator to identify the root cause of a network zombie attack easily.

Greater Protection Against the Zombie Menace

Once zombies have been caught, system administrators can use APM to create multi-step action zombie traps to address future invasions more quickly. Traps can include event logging, real-time alerts and PowerShell self-healing scripts such as reboot and service restart. Setting zombie trap policies can be assigned at the service, application and component level. Dependency-aware application profiles enable coordinated multi-tier zombie traps to ensure optimal performance of complex applications and IT services.

An APM tool can streamline the process of hunting and trapping zombies, whether they reside in a device or in the network itself, from many hours of exhausting work into a few highly-productive minutes.

Now there's a weapon people confronted with shuffling zombies in a horror film might wish they had at their disposal.

Megan Assarrane is Product Marketing Manager at Ipswitch.

Hot Topics

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Industry experts offer predictions on how AI will evolve and impact technology and business in 2025. Part 3 covers AI's impact on employees and their roles ...

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E-commerce is set to skyrocket with a 9% rise over the next few years ... To thrive in this competitive environment, retailers must identify digital resilience as their top priority. In a world where savvy shoppers expect 24/7 access to online deals and experiences, any unexpected downtime to digital services can lead to significant financial losses, damage to brand reputation, abandoned carts with designer shoes, and additional issues ...

Efficiency is a highly-desirable objective in business ... We're seeing this scenario play out in enterprises around the world as they continue to struggle with infrastructures and remote work models with an eye toward operational efficiencies. In contrast to that goal, a recent Broadcom survey of global IT and network professionals found widespread adoption of these strategies is making the network more complex and hampering observability, leading to uptime, performance and security issues. Let's look more closely at these challenges ...

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The 2025 Catchpoint SRE Report dives into the forces transforming the SRE landscape, exploring both the challenges and opportunities ahead. Let's break down the key findings and what they mean for SRE professionals and the businesses relying on them ...

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The pressure on IT teams has never been greater. As data environments grow increasingly complex, resource shortages are emerging as a major obstacle for IT leaders striving to meet the demands of modern infrastructure management ... According to DataStrike's newly released 2025 Data Infrastructure Survey Report, more than half (54%) of IT leaders cite resource limitations as a top challenge, highlighting a growing trend toward outsourcing as a solution ...

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Gartner revealed its top strategic predictions for 2025 and beyond. Gartner's top predictions explore how generative AI (GenAI) is affecting areas where most would assume only humans can have lasting impact ...

The adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) is accelerating across the telecoms industry, with 88% of fixed broadband service providers now investigating or trialing AI automation to enhance their fixed broadband services, according to new research from Incognito Software Systems and Omdia ...

 

AWS is a cloud-based computing platform known for its reliability, scalability, and flexibility. However, as helpful as its comprehensive infrastructure is, disparate elements and numerous siloed components make it difficult for admins to visualize the cloud performance in detail. It requires meticulous monitoring techniques and deep visibility to understand cloud performance and analyze operational efficiency in detail to ensure seamless cloud operations ...