Hello from the road where I'm meeting SMB business people in Chicago, Seattle, New York and Houston as host of Network World’s technology event, IT Strategies for Small to Mid-size Businesses . Attendees at every stop reinforce my belief that networks are more critical than ever for all businesses, small or large.

One of the tour sponsors, Ipswitch , compares data networking to power networks. It models its What'sUp Gold network monitoring software on Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) monitoring systems used by electric companies. Utilities typically have a control room monitoring system showing a network diagram, important network devices, and a dashboard that uses simple green, yellow and red indications to show their status.

Your network probably doesn't contain steam-driven electrical turbines, but it does include servers, routers and various appliances. What'sUp Gold queries the network and discovers each of them, and displays them in a logical network diagram. Discovery and control functions rely on the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP ) developed in the 1980s and included in every business-class network device sold today. Information about a device, including a variety of details about function, is disclosed by the device to an authorized SNMP monitoring station.

The case study Ipswitch uses to illustrate What'sUp Gold came from its installation at the Paris Opera. While one doesn't normally think of network devices in an opera house, the Paris Opera relies on 30 servers and 700 workstations to support ticket sales and manage a membership database. But today's modern theater also needs computers to run lights, sound and other backstage functions such as scenery deployment during performances. Without a functioning network, the show really doesn't go on, and Ipswitch supports 175 performances a year at the Paris Opera.

You probably don't run an opera house, but an intelligent network monitoring utility that could notify you a variety of ways (e-mail, text message, pager) about a problem network device can still be music to your ears. Many devices accept commands from What'sUp Gold, allowing the software to restart services and even restart servers. Wouldn't you rather get a text message that your monitoring software rebooted a malfunctioning e-mail server than having your boss call and tell you the e-mail server is down? If you're the IT person, the last way you want to hear about a network problem is from your boss. Or even worse, from customers who bought elsewhere because your Web server was down.