Tom Tosh

Author Profile - Tom Tosh is a seasoned trainer and proven senior level consultant and analyst. He spent the last 10+ years at Network General where he was there Senior Consultant and Project Manager. He has recently founded Chi-Metrix where Tom prides himself on bringing his considerable skills to help network customers with their network issues. From planning to troubleshooting, Tom is one of the best and is a long-time Oldcommguy’s associate and a proven solution focused technologist!

Tom’s skills, training and experience allows him to -

- Diagnose network and application performance issues.
- Perform network assessments, health checks and application baselines
- Provide coaching and training to help IT groups make better use of network tools.
- Derive actionable information from captured trace files
- Evaluate effectiveness of problem management practices (per ITIL)
- Develop visibility assessments to better target investments in tools
- Design and manage projects related to application rollouts and network changes.

Tom has served a wide variety of clients (corporations and non-profit organizations, as well as local, state and federal government agencies) all over North America, Australia and Japan.

Tom can be reached at - tom.tosh (at) chi-metrix (dot) com.

March 18, 2008

Measuring for Business Impact – The “Level 4 Measurement”

If you can’t measure, you can’t really manage. A site dedicated to tools should ultimately be keenly interested in the overall effectiveness and the success of the network manager. (And how do we propose to measure that?) Our very approach to measuring things should also be subject to scrutiny and assessment, since nothing can lead to greater waste of effort and resources than measuring the wrong things, or measuring the right things in the wrong way. We are all familiar of “GIGO”. Garbage in, Garbage out, so we want to make sure what answers we seek and data acquire are valuable sources of information.

If we are going to get the most out of the investments made to managing a network, I believe we have to begin by looking at our own approach to measuring things and consider how that approach aligns to four tightly-linked dimensions, or levels. Of equal importance is the ability to evaluate the assessments that others present to us.

Continue reading "Measuring for Business Impact – The “Level 4 Measurement”" »

February 27, 2008

Tools, Process and Metrics for Network Managers

Having spent as much of my career helping network operations teams deploy and make more effective use of analysis tools, I know there is quite a steep ramp between the promise and the reality: Tools alone do not create knowledge. Seeing is not the same as knowing.

In this series of articles, I would like to broaden the focus on tools beyond features alone, and discuss the environment and processes in which tools are used to provide tangible benefits. I would like to share and advance some concepts on how to better evaluate and get more out of the tools we invest in. This, after all, has been the main thrust of my work over the past five years.

If you can’t measure, you can’t really manage. A site dedicated to tools should ultimately be keenly interested in the overall effectiveness and the success of the network manager. (And how do we propose to measure that?) The measurements we choose should also be subject to scrutiny and assessment, since nothing can lead to greater waste of effort than measuring the wrong things or measuring in the wrong way.

Continue reading "Tools, Process and Metrics for Network Managers" »