98: This CTO Changed How I Think About Network Monitoring

Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
So last week I had the chance toattend Cisco Live, which is
basically the biggest computer networking conference in the
world. Like the world.
And it was wild. Tons of cool tech, awesome
sessions. Of course, AI was plastered all
over the place, but what? Was the best.
Part is I kind of chat with someseriously smart people doing

(00:22):
some amazing things in the industry.
One of those conversations I captured and that really stuck
with me, it was with Tim Titus, the CTO of Past Solutions.
We talked about how network monitoring has changed over the
years, and why having the right monitoring solution in place
isn't just helpful for keeping things running smoothly, it's

(00:43):
actually a big part of setting yourself.
Up for long? Term success in your career as a
network engineer. Because when you can see the
problems clearly and fix them fast, you're not just the person
keeping the lights on, you're the one driving real impact.
Here's that chat I recorded livefrom the World of Solutions
floor at Cisco Live. Let's dive into it.

(01:06):
Phenomenon welcome up our CTO, Tim Titus, as well as the
bearded IT Dad to come do a little live podcast for us.
So come on in, folks. I'm going to pass this off to
you, Sir. Thank you very much.
Welcome Tim. Welcome everyone.
Thank you for joining us live from Cisco Live.
This is actually pre recorded. I just realized, but we are
filming this here in the middle of Cisco Live's world of

(01:27):
solution, we got Tim Titus, the CTO of Path Solutions.
And Tim, why don't you take a few seconds and introduce who
you are? And why should we care who you
are? Well, I'm going to start off
with I'm feeling like I'm at a little bit of a disadvantage
here. Let me even the playing field,

(01:53):
OK? Playing field evened.
That's awesome. We, we were joking earlier that,
you know, you're one of the few that didn't have facial hair
here, especially among your ranks.
Got to, got to level that up. Yeah, you, you, you.
Beard hair usually means it's like, you know, your technical
stuff. And white beard hair means
you're like Gandalf of IT. Exactly, exactly.

(02:16):
So I'm the CTO and founder of Pass Solutions.
I've been a network engineer forover 35 years and so I've seen
and and dealt with just about everything in the world of
networking. I've dealt with bus networks,
Ethernet where you have terminators fall off the end,
arc net, token ring, Novell net where I had my CNE back in the

(02:38):
day. So I figure my my Gray hair has
been earned officially. Well, Speaking of that Gray
hair, you sounds like you've been in the industry for a
while. And today I want to take a
minute and talk about the history of network monitoring.
So you've seen a thing or two and let's let's talk about how
the industry is involved in the realms of network monitoring.

(03:01):
So I'm going to say that really,my first encounter with network
monitoring was back in the days of HP Openview.
Anyone? HP Openview.
Yeah. So effectively HP Open View came
around because people realized you had Sun Solaris systems.
You needed to have some way of monitoring these systems.
And in one sense, HP Open View was really the first entrant

(03:24):
into that market of doing generalized monitoring.
It would ping things, but reallythat's the core of the solution.
It would just ping things. What you had to do with it
though, is you spent a lot of time saying, well, let me add a
module. Let me add an SNMP module, let
me add a, a, a monitor for network monitor.
And so you'd Add all these modules and spend a ton of time

(03:45):
configuring it to try and get visibility into what's up and
what's down. And it was great at that, but it
was also very expensive, took a lot of effort to be able to
support. And so eventually its heyday
ended up passing. Now it passed to a product
called What's Up Gold. And if anyone's familiar with

(04:07):
what's what, What's Up Gold was is it was a desktop application,
very inexpensive. Lot of folks said, hey, go get
that. It'll ping your things and you
can do a little bit more than ping.
You can actually add some other monitors to it and be able to
collect some data. Didn't really have good
historic, but it would still tell you about something that
was down. As long as the application was

(04:27):
running on your desktop, woe wasyou if somebody came and closed
the desktop. Oh my gosh.
I've been there before, though, you know, and we're still
talking early days here, right? You know so.
This might be before you were born.
I do believe so. I mean, we've been talking about
what's up gold all week and yeah, it's it was a great

(04:51):
solution for its time, but it was still was lacking in
capabilities and features. Yeah.
And so effectively, it had its heyday and its sunset.
And really what came into play right after that was SolarWinds.
And SolarWinds was something that a lot of people celebrated.
They said this is fantastic, it's all web-based, how many
folks use SolarWinds, OK. So effectively it's it's

(05:15):
web-based, you have a lot of configuration to be able to say
I want to collect that information, I want to collect
other information, I want to collect Windows information.
And at its beginning it was fantastic because it was
reasonably priced. A lot of people could get it and
you could cover a lot of bases with it and you didn't have to
worry about somebody closing thelaptop.

(05:36):
Over time though, they seem to have grown to the point where it
is now viewed as the expensive solution.
I'm noticing a common trend here.
Everything gets more expensive as time goes.
Well, in one sense, they add value along the way.
So they added a lot of value. The problem is, is that they
ended up being bolt on modules that didn't integrate fully with

(05:58):
a solution. And so it's kind of like this
car that's like, well, it's a car, but it's also a pickup
truck and it has this plant hanging off the outside.
And it's it's it's it's just notreally perfectly designed for
what it really should be able todo is top to bottom network
monitoring. So it's kind of turned into
this, you know, bunch of bolt onmodules that end up becoming

(06:19):
very expensive. User interface is not as clean.
People say, Gee, in order to really understand it, you have
to go to training classes, finding out how to do something.
You're pressing control alt leftshift, you know, to try and find
out where something is. And the person who really knows
how to make that product sing just left your company.
So you're kind of stuck saying we don't really know what's

(06:42):
going on. So all we use it for is painting
things. And so I encountered that,
worked with that for a number ofyears and figured, OK, this is
actually frustrating to me personally, and I got angry.
What do you do when you're angered?
You you take down the network and run for the hills.

(07:02):
No, you go home at the end of the day and you pull out AC
compiler. And that's what I did for a
number of years is I started building my own solution.
And I just got to the point where my anger and frustration
said, I want to build something that is easy to use, that tells
you everything about the networkso that you don't have to search

(07:25):
for the problems on the network.I was really frustrated with the
fact that a lot of those other monitoring solutions out there,
you have to say, go monitor this, now go monitor this, now
go monitor this. And you have to program it and
spend weeks, if not months to try and see what's going on in
the network. And I think like many other
network engineers, I wished for a solution that said if you

(07:48):
could deploy and have it magically tell you everything
that's broken because it has thesmarts, that's a great thing
about software. You can build smarts into
software to have it do almost anything but that.
The software would find the problems in the network and then
give you a list and say, here's everything that's broken.
That way you can go through and say I'm going to spend my day

(08:10):
making the network a better place.
Well, and I'll, I'll chime in there because at my company, I'm
a director of network operationsand I adopted a infrastructure
and a network monitoring system that had been in place for four
years. And during that four years, it
was still not fully deployed because it just took so many

(08:33):
hours, so much time to get everylittle sensor manually
configured, get every little thing working perfectly.
And it never did. I I would get it working for
just a few days and then all of a sudden the database would
become corrupted and I'd have torecompile the database or
something like that. It got so frustrating.

(08:53):
And when I first heard about path solutions, I was like, oh,
something, I can just make everything work together.
I can just push a button and it just works.
And it was such a sigh of reliefbecause it takes hours and hours
of time to get the right kind ofmonitoring working.
And you got to have that visibility of what's going on in

(09:14):
your network and then. What happens is the network
changes. Exactly.
And what do you do? You spend another like week
reconfiguring your monitoring software just so you know what
is going on if. Only the networks would stay
static. You can actually get things
working. Sadly that doesn't exist.
No, not. Anymore and networks nowadays
are evolving faster than ever. We have new technology entering

(09:38):
our networks every single day. And with the introduction of AI,
it is just the demand on the network has never been more
great. And because of that demand it we
are expected as network engineers to make sure that
network has 100% up time. No, no more triple nines or
whatever. You know you have to have 100%

(09:59):
up time. If it's not, then people start
grading you and say, Gee, you'rejust not up to par.
And the biggest problem with keeping 100% up time is
understanding the network. I mean, sadly I still encounter
network engineers that say I don't even know what is in my
network. I'm responsible for this stuff
and I don't know what's there. And I want to dive back into, so

(10:21):
you were just fed up with the current monitoring tools and so
you went home, you opened up AC compiler and said I am going to
be the change. I am going to be the the light
that guides this industry and you've created path solutions.
So tell me a bit more about thatprocess.
Not every day someone just goes out and says, I am tired of the

(10:42):
norm. I'm going to change this
industry. Well, I did talk to a lot of my
friends who are network engineers and found that they
did have like problems. And when you have friends that
all have like problems and they all run the same tools that
you've run, and you're like, OK,nobody's solving this problem
because nobody's listening to us.
OK, I'm going to go solve that problem.
And so I had to learn how to setup a website, how to be able to

(11:05):
sell the software, how to be able to build a company, be able
to grow a company. In one sense though, my pure joy
is still finding a feature that we can add that solves a network
engineer's problem. And so really the path all along
has been talking to other network engineers saying, oh, I
have this problem, how do you solve it?

(11:26):
You know what, we don't solve it.
Give me 6 months and I'll get a solution for you.
And so our product has really evolved to the point where it is
incredibly easy to use because network engineers look at it and
say, oh, this is where I would expect this tab to be.
This is where I'd expect to findthis data.
And so by collecting and analysing the information the
way network engineers would wantto see, this means it's kind of

(11:49):
a natural solution. I sadly believe our poor
documentation people. Nobody reads it.
That that is true. And you know, documentation is
so important. But yeah, so do you still
consider yourself a bit of a network engineer?
Because that way I can say that this tool is built by a network
engineer for network engineers at.
My core, I've been a network engineer.

(12:09):
I will always be a network engineer.
I love talking to network engineers.
I'm, I'm, I'm a geek at heart. But if somebody says, hey, I've
got a problem and we, if we don't solve that problem, we
will. That's the whole trick because
we have a really fast turn cyclewhere we can build stuff that
answers root cause problems in networks, and that's really my

(12:30):
whole mode of operation. You know, that's so cool.
I've spent this entire week withyou and your team and man do I
have some stories. But that's for another podcast
episode. How much is that could it cost
me to keep those quiet? But it is amazing just hearing
you guys talk around the dinner table, you know, during this
week on how well you guys work together as a team.

(12:52):
And it it's, it's really specialthat when I have a problem with
this monitoring software, which I haven't really had any yet, I
had one and Tim was just Johnny on the spot for this.
But I pick up the phone and I actually talk to a real person
based here stateside. I just think that was the
coolest thing ever. And they come in to get to know

(13:14):
the faces behind the telephone. It it's cool and amazing what
you guys have developed here. Well, thank you.
In one sense, we're a little bitold school by the fact that we
still sell this as a perpetual license.
I think we're going to be the last company out there selling
perpetual licenses to people just because we're figuring, no,
we don't want SAS because really, honestly, nobody wants

(13:37):
SAS. And so we're like kind of
sticking to where we are. We like to have ourselves be
accessible, our support. You're not going to go through a
phone tree. You're going to talk to the
support person who's going to help you out It it's just this
is all, as far as I'm concerned,very old school mentality.
And it's like, OK, that's how you delight customers.
You say old school, but you are truly innovating and bringing in

(14:01):
cutting edge technology. I feel you know, we were talking
about the the overtaking of AI in the industry.
You walk around any of these booths here at Cisco Live and
you cannot get through 2 secondstalking to a salesperson without
the words AI coming up. And you are why?
You say you're old school. You are still integrating AI
into your monitoring softwares. So kind of I'm going to qualify

(14:24):
that there's a lot of companies around here that are bantering
around with AI, saying, hey, we do AI this and AI that.
And it's like, well, that's a lot of market texture.
That's a lot of great marketing speak.
But under the hood, it's actually not really a lot of AI.
And so be cautious when you hearthe term.
The one thing we've had from really the start of our product
is a heuristics engine. A heuristics engine is not AI,

(14:47):
it's effectively a logic machine.
What this does is it gets plain English answers to root causes
of problems in the network. For example, you can deploy our
software and within the first day we're going to tell you, you
have a cabling fault on this port of this switch.
You have a VLAN tagging fault onthis port of this switch.
You have a microburst link floodon the trunk port.

(15:07):
So we will tell you all of the plain English answers of
everything that is broken in your network.
And there's no AI, It's a heuristics engine, but we are
working on some AI that is actually going to be
functionally useful. And effectively, I'm going to
allude a little bit to that is as a network engineer, you ever
hate it when you have a manager come up and say, oh, give me a

(15:30):
report. I want to know which interfaces
in the network are hitting 90% of the utilization or plan to
hit 90% utilization within the next three months out of our NE
corridor. And you're thinking, OK, that's
going to take me a week to get compile the information, put it
together, answer the question ofthe executive.
And then the executive says, well, what about the SE

(15:50):
corridor? And you're back doing reporting
again. Engineers don't like doing
reporting like this. If you had a way of just having
AUI that said, show me all the interfaces in the Northeast
corridor that are scheduled to hit over 90% utilization in the
next three months go and it cameback.
At that point, what you do is you give the manager the access

(16:13):
to that AI and say here, answer all of your reporting questions
yourself. I'm no longer involved.
So I've implemented path solutions into my network
operation center. And one thing about a good piece
of hardware or a good piece of software, a good tool, is it
frees me up to do what's really important, the more important

(16:35):
things. And a lot of people I know are
scared to spend money on a new technology and stuff like that.
But The thing is, US network engineers, our time is so
valuable and what Paas Solutionshas done is bought me back that
time. It is giving me time to focus on
other projects and to implementing new things like the

(16:55):
wonderful world of IPV 6 that weall love and we all are already
eager to adopt. But it allows me to do so much
more. It lessens the workload.
It's with your heuristic. Are you going home on time?
Am I going home on time? Yeah, because I am actually.
I'm going home on time and like like you're any.

(17:16):
Nights and weekends solving network problems or not.
Sometimes, but that's not path solutions problem.
That's my problem. But the The thing is like with
that heuristics engineer you're talking about, it allows me with
those plain English, you know, descriptions.
It allows me to pass them off tomaybe an entry level network
technician or something else. Someone that may not have as

(17:39):
much experience that would normally just see an error come
in from the monitoring software and like, oh Nope, we're going
to kick that up the chain to me.And I'm again spend those nights
and weekends dealing with troubleshooting.
It simplifies that for me and frees me up time where they can
start solving their own problemsand get more confident in the
network. So effectively, it makes a
junior level tech work as equivalent of a senior level

(18:02):
tech. That's our whole game.
Absolutely, Tim. This has been a great episode.
This has been an amazing week here at Cisco Live.
It's just been so great watchingyour team explain and talk to
other network engineers. I really have enjoyed this time
here. If people want to go learn more
about past solutions and what you guys are doing, where can

(18:22):
they find you so? Go hit up our website,
www.pathsolutions.com. We have videos up there that
explains what we do. We have a sandbox.
You can end up registering to end up seeing the whole product.
You can also do a demo. So be able to contact our sales,
we'll send you a POC, we'll do afull demo for your team so you
understand what's what it's all about.
But really the whole game is if we can help solve more problems

(18:46):
on your network at a lower cost,then we win, you win, everyone's
happy. That's the whole game.
Thank you again for taking the time and thank you everyone for
showing up for this epic live atCisco live event.
Dakota. Thank you.
Absolutely. Everyone stick around because we
are gonna actually be giving outsome swag here at Cisco Live

(19:07):
from the bearded IT dad's channel.
So everyone, thank you for tuning in and I hope to see you
in the next video.

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