phone companies, their outside network. For example, when a customers place a service call to their telephone company or computer vender, the technician may say, "The problem must be in your equipment because there is no problem in our network or equipment," or if there is no response to the ping the technician may say, "We see a problem and will dispatch a technician." www.TechnicalPDF.com Alerts-24 Hours a Day, 7 Days a Week IT staff monitor enterprise networks around the clock. Monitoring systems are able to check cloud-based applications as well as LAN gear. They are able to access their cloud applications' HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) addresses from within browsers to determine if they are able to log into applications. Monitoring software can be programmed to alert staff of outages via e-mail, text messaging, and audible alerts. If key cloud- based applications or parts of the network such as e-mail or the entire network are down, they notify staff after hours as well as during work hours. Organizations define which devices should trigger alerts. Alerts are often programmed differently after hours than during the day. For example, only issues that adversely affect the entire network may trigger an alert after hours. After hours, if on call IT staff can't clear the problem remotely, they may be expected to come into work to try to resolve the problem during off hours SO that the network is available the next morning. Monitoring software is close to 100 percent accurate, but there are occasionally false positives and false negative alerts. In a similar way to, for example, strep throat or cancer screenings where false positives mistakenly indicate the presence of cancer or strep, with false positives, the system thinks there's an outage. A false negative is when an outage occurred, but the monitoring system didn't see it. With false negatives, the software falsely thinks the gear is up, and IT staff is not notified of an outage. Per Jim Chapman, Product Manager at Lexington, Massachusetts-based monitori