‘If You Could Say One Thing to Your Network, What Would It Be?’

When SolarWinds whimsically asked IT pros what they would say to their networks if they could say one thing to them, the answers were both amusing and telling.

Sorry. Not sorry. I will always place the blame on you. –Yours truly, Systems Administrator.

I know once upon a time you used to run so freely in the green fields, and I’m sorry for choking you down with firewalls, proxies, vulnerability scanners and various other tools that poke and prod at you day and night. Trust me, though, this is for your own good—it’s a dangerous world out there! While I know that I throttle your ability to stream YouTube and Pandora, and I block your ability to do, well, just about everything you want to do, please understand that it’s because I love you (and my job). I hope you can forgive me now and in the future as we continue to choke you to near-uselessness.

Thanks for all you’ve done over the past year. You did a crackerjack job. There were some small issues, but all were sorted out in no time. I hope you can keep it up in 2016, even though shrinking budgets will probably prevent me from being able to add many shiny new bits to you. If you can forgive me for that, I’m sure you and I will continue to work wonderfully together.

I’m sorry for sending loads of extra traffic between sites because I haven’t finished building the disaster recovery environment.

Hurry Up. –Sincerely, Everyone.

It’s been a tough first year together, but we got through it. I know your previous owners were less than attentive, but hopefully you’ve seen by now that I care a lot more than they did and I’m trying to give you everything you need. And know that we’ve got some big changes planned for you in 2016. It’ll be a makeover you’ll love—your bottlenecks will be removed, your oldest routers replaced and we’ll have all the best tools we need to look after you properly.