The job of the network administrator appears never-ending. Constantly searching through monitoring data to isolate and solve the problem of the day means long hours and few nights home with family. The problem often isn't that there's not enough data to identify network problems and performance issues, but usually that there's too much.

This week I sat down with Matt Bolton of PacketTrap, a brand new network monitoring solutions provider in the market. This company sells a network monitoring product called Perspective that is designed to assist the network administrator with just these sorts of problems. A product not unlike Orion from Solarwinds or Openview from HP, Perspective gives a new...perspective...on the network by dialing down the amount of data shown to the administrator. Matt tells me that his main priority is in "getting network administrators back home for dinner."

If you're an overworked network administrator, you'll want to pull up a chair and check out this great podcast with PacketTrap where we talk about what you need to do just that.