How can I know if our cabling was certified? Can we do it after already installed?

Hi all,

TL:DR below.

When we moved into this new building 2 years ago I was just the on-call IT guy for the company so I had some input but not a lot. I gave references for cabling installers but I guess it was "too expensive" so they picked some ISP guys that did it on their own time (after hours). It appears they did a good job and the cabling is very neat and labeled, however, as we've doubled in size to 100 employees and use web apps, VoIP, network shares, you know all the regular stuff, I can't help but wonder if our occasional network problems are due to the cabling or outside factors (QoS, network gear, etc).

That's a longer topic so keeping it centered on cabling, when I ask my boss if our cabling was certified, what would I ask for? He might say, "what would it (the document) look like?" Also, could I contact a company and have them come in and do a certification after the fact? Like what things would they test for and could they give me recommendations on how to improve our network?

Lastly, our most recent cabling additions as we've expanded into more of the building, management has decided the handyman can do it because he's inexpensive. If he's just using a basic tester/toner (I don't know what gear he owns), how would I know if they cabling is bad, since I don't have an expensive tester? Also on this new side, from what I can tell, he did not terminate the cables, they just go straight from the patch panel in the back to the user's PC.

A couple follow-up questions would be. On the original side where everything is properly terminated, the handyman made his own cabling to run to the cubes which vary from about 8ft - 15ft depending on how far the cube is from the wall. Should I replace all these with patch cables? Granted in the 2 years here I've only had to replace at most 6 ends because they were loose.

Next, what is an inexpensive toner for under $100. I bought a cheap $20 last year and it's junk. I ask this because partly I feel that management expects me to do all this cabling since I'm the sysadmin. However, my expertise is in server and desktop support, I mean I did cabling for very small mom and pop shops early in my career but stopped because I didn't want to mislead people in quality. I think it should be done properly. Should a need arise though, I would like to be able to tone and find cabling.

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TL:DR

Cabling was done 2 years ago and appears to be done well, but I don't know if it's certified.

1. How do I check and/or should I have a company come in to certify?
2. What do they test for and what recommendations do they offer?
3. Should I replace handmade cables with factory patch cables?
4. Inexpensive cable toner?