Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

February 2021

How to Identify the Zoom Data Center Location on AWS Infrastructure

Zoom leverage AWS’s global infrastructure, storage, content distribution, and security to deliver its service and store information securely in AWS data centers around the world. This means that when you’re looking to monitor your Zoom performance, it’s important to know how to identify which AWS data center location your Zoom application is using. Keep reading to find out how.

11 Network Traffic Terms to Know

Every industry loves its terms and jargon. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: “I’ve always said that one of my core competencies is getting the most bang for my buck out of the sweat equity I put in during my 9-to-5.” Sure, the sentence doesn’t really make any sense, but it sounds good enough when you say it. And that’s just the point jargon tends to make. The IT industry is no different.

Windows network monitoring made easy with OpManager

Network administrators are responsible for the day-to-day operation of computer networks at organizations of any size and scale. Their primary duty is to manage, monitor, and keep a close watch on the network infrastructure to prevent and minimize downtime. Managing a network includes monitoring all the network components, including Windows devices. In any Windows network, the desktops, servers, virtual servers, and virtual machines (VMs), like Hyper-V, run on the Windows operating system.

All You Need To Know About Cloud Interconnection

Many enterprises today have a range of assets residing in a mixture of both public and private clouds. As a result, there is a need to connect not just site-to-cloud but also cloud-to-cloud - use cases we would term Data Centre Interconnection (DCI) and Cloud Interconnection.

Logging with the HAProxy Kubernetes Ingress Controller

The HAProxy Kubernetes Ingress Controller publishes two sets of logs: the ingress controller logs and the HAProxy access logs. After you install the HAProxy Kubernetes Ingress Controller, logging jumps to mind as one of the first features to configure. Logs will tell you whether the controller has started up correctly and which version of the controller you’re running, and they will assist in pinpointing any user experience issues.

How to Monitor Google Network Performance: Google Meet, Google Workspace, Gmail and Google Calendar

Application slowdowns, poor Internet speed, and laggy video calls are always frustrating. Whether you’re working in an office, or working from home, it’s important to keep an eye on the applications that matter most. In this article, we’re teaching you how to monitor the network performance of Google apps, including Google Meet, Google Workspace, Gmail & Google Calendar.

Key Strategies for Migrating to a New Network Monitoring Solution

Adopting a new network monitoring solution involves more than just installation and discovery of devices. In this video, Broadcom discusses the steps taken by real-world customers and reveals the strategies needed for a successful migration to a new network monitoring platform.

What Are the Types of Network Devices?

The term network device covers a lot of ground. Anything from a simple unmanaged switch to a dial-up modem to a UTM (unified threat management) appliance can fit the bill. Additionally, the lines between what category different networking devices fall into can get fuzzy because in many cases a single device performs multiple functions. Here, to help you sort through that fuzziness, we tackle the concept of network devices from the ground up.

Layer 2 vs Layer 3 Network Switches: What's the Difference?

A network switch is a fundamental piece of any network, so it’s critical that you as an IT professional understand the role of a switch in a properly functioning network. And to best understand the difference between Layer 2 switches and Layer 3 switches, you also need to know the difference between Layer 2 and Layer 3 in the OSI networking model.

The what, why, and how of using network IP scanners in IP-centric IT infrastructures

A simple command-line interface (CLI) ping will give you details about your target IP address. However, you may have to input the ipconfig command, and then the arp-a command to fully discover the status of an IP, and this is just for one IP address. Now imagine doing this for an IP block of 300 IPs, or even 50 IPs, or doing the same task periodically to manage your IP pool of thousands of addresses and their metrics. Seems like an Herculean task for any network admin!

Using HAProxy as an API Gateway, Part 4 [Metrics]

HAProxy publishes more than 100 metrics about the traffic flowing through it. When you use HAProxy as an API gateway, these give you insight into how clients are accessing your APIs. Several metrics come to mind as particularly useful, since they can help you determine whether you’re meeting your service-level objectives and can detect issues with your services early on. Let’s discuss several that might come in handy.

What Is Cloud Networking?

The future is bright for the cloud. In 2019, 90% of companies were already in the cloud and this impressive amount is expected to jump another 4% in 2021. And it gets even more interesting. By 2024, more than 45% of IT spending will edge out legacy networks and replace them with the cloud. As this reality unfolds, the result will be a long-term change in enterprise IT and supplier landscapes. It also means that knowing the cloud is part of the new normal of IT. What’s helping to drive these trends?

End-to-End Network Monitoring: Critical KPIs to Track

The IT network stays at the foundation of all the operations and data transfers within your business. Unreliable network or problems with the network performance may have a severe impact on your business. Running a business requires a robust and secure network, that managed effectively to meet all the necessary performance and security goals. The standard network monitoring is not enough in the digital transformation era.

How to Block an External Attack with FortiGate and Flowmon ADS

It’s a question we hear often - how to use Flowmon to block an attack? Flowmon is not an inline appliance to stand in the path of inbound traffic, so we partner with 3rd party vendors who supply equipment like firewalls or unified security gateways. In this post, I’m going to show you how to instruct Fortinet’s firewall FortiGate via Flowmon ADS to block traffic in response to a detected anomaly or attack.

What is Synthetic Monitoring and What Are the Benefits? | Obkio

Many traditional network monitoring solutions use a packet capture method to capture real-user data and monitor network performance. Now, modern network monitoring tools have switched to synthetic monitoring to monitor network performance without collecting user information. What is Synthetic Monitoring? It is a monitoring technique used to monitor application and network performance by simulating user activity.

Why CSPs Need to Shift Focus to Service Experience Monitoring

The past twelve months have pushed many communication service providers (CSPs) to the limit. According to financial reports of the last six months, the New Normal brought about by the pandemic has significantly increased network expansion efforts, IoT connections, new broadband customers, and out of bundle voice traffic and mobile data.

6 Best Network Traffic Monitor Software Options

Understanding how data flows across your network is a must for effective network management. But with network perimeters becoming more dynamic than ever before and nodes spread across the cloud, home offices, and corporate data centers, gaining the visibility you need is a challenge. There are plenty of network traffic monitor software options available that can help you address these challenges, but how do you know which is best for you?

Martello in Motion | Real User Monitoring & Network Visualization

As an industry-leading provider of the most comprehensive Microsoft 365 monitoring solution, Martello is in a class all its own; our digital experience monitoring solution features key capabilities that help IT teams identify when and where cloud application performance issues are happening and how to best mitigate the impact.

What Are Network Address Translation and Port Address Translation?

Network address translation (NAT) is very simple in concept. As packets pass through some network device—typically a firewall, router, or load balancer—either the source or destination IP address is changed. Then packets returning in the other direction are translated back to the original addresses. In some cases both are changed at once, which is called “twice NAT” in some documentation.

Scaling Up and Out With the Orion Platform

SolarWinds Orion Platform products are designed with flexibility in mind to cover networks of all shapes and sizes. Whether you’re monitoring a large datacenter or hundreds of small retail locations, we’ll talk through the different options for the most efficient coverage of your environment. We’ll also showcase a few of the features from recent releases benefitting everyone but are particularly useful when monitoring large environments.

SolarWinds Service Desk Integration With the Orion Platform

IT service management plays a critical role in IT operations. It is the primary center for communication between end users and everything IT does to keep the business running efficiently. In this session, learn how to connect Service Desk to Orion monitoring, helping IT react to and resolve infrastructure issues faster. We’ll cover the types of alerts that should trigger Service Desk incidents, discovering asset data from the Orion® Platform, and how to leverage Service Desk automation to expedite resolutions.

How to Build Modern Dashboards in the Orion Platform

The Orion Platform has a new modern dashboarding framework. This data-driven dashboard framework provides greater level of flexibility over how data is displayed. It includes a grid-based layout, new widgets types, and drag-and-drop placement with full vertical and horizontal widget scaling. SolarWinds Senior Technical Trainer Cheryl Nomanson takes you through a detailed setup and configuration including how to add multiple Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

Taking an API-First Approach to Network Management

Application programming interfaces (APIs) allow applications to communicate, interoperate, and share information with one another. APIs have been mainstays at companies like Google, Salesforce, and other smaller but innovative organizations for decades. Now, they’re also common in the public sector, with a wide range of agencies actively using hundreds of APIs.

What is MEF 3.0 and why it matters

You may have spotted some news last week from PCCW Global that both its international network and the Console Connect digital platform have recently received MEF 3.0 certification. Besides demonstrating to our customers and partners that Console Connect is aligned with the latest and highest network standards, this news also highlights the work that we are doing behind-the-scenes to help advance network automation and on-demand services globally. Read more…

ADS 11.2 - More than ordinary blacklists

Improve your security posture with community Indicators of Compromise and use reputation data to detect threats in encrypted traffic. On the digital battleground, it pays to stay on your toes, but there are ways to make the work easier. Flowmon ADS 11.2 brings you new and refined methods of avoiding known threats and learning from attacks carried out against others. Main news.

Secure by Design | Our Plan for a Safer SolarWinds and Customer Community

Companies must change the way they operate to combat increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks across ever-expanding attack surfaces. What we learn from one attack can help us protect against the next. Because the next attack is always on the horizon. What should you do to raise your defenses? SolarWinds President and CEO Sudhakar Ramakrishna and cybersecurity expert and Krebs Stamos Group Founding Partner Alex Stamos discuss our plan for a safer SolarWinds and customer community – grounded in principles you can follow to secure your enterprise.

Why is Network Topology Important for Your Business?

With more and more businesses depending on technology, networking can get more and more complex. Therefore, a network topology plan, which gives you a clear oversight of what’s at stake, will always be useful. But what are the benefits of having a topology system in place? How can it help a business with its performance management in real-time? There are a variety of network monitoring tools out there that practice a topological approach to support.

What Are the Benefits of Network Monitoring for Your Business?

In the modern age, all businesses rely on technology. Any company based in an office will depend on networking, too. But how can you be sure that your network is working hard enough for you? No matter the size or shape of your business, it pays to be careful. Without some form of monitoring solution, you, your team, and your revenue are at the mercy of your technology. For many companies, managed network monitoring solutions are essential. It is an industry that is worth $207 billion worldwide.

Your Guide to the Best Network Monitoring Tools

Monitoring your network is essential if you want to make sure you are protecting your productivity. However, knowing where to start is a challenge. That’s why there are multiple network monitoring tools available. But how do you necessarily know which are likely to work best for you? In this guide, we will look at some of the most popular network monitoring software available. We will also consider what each model does to help support network management in real-time.

What is Network Management?

Anyone with an office in the modern age will depend on a network of some kind. Whether you are a small enterprise or a larger company, you’re likely dependent on technology. But what happens when something goes wrong with that network? Do you know how to keep track of its different components and areas? Corporate networking can be complicated. However, managing it properly is vital to make sure that you are hitting your KPIs.

What Is Network Security?

Have you ever been in the middle of a breach remediation? While the first priority is handling the initial breach, after it’s resolved the priorities quickly change to mitigating future attacks. You prepare a detailed report with specific actions to take, products to consider, and changes to make to overall policies. And then a senior executive in the company asks, “Is there something I can buy to make all this go away? Some piece of software to install?

Operators and Service Providers' Lucrative 5G First-Mover Opportunity

The next-generation of mobile connectivity is rapidly bringing supercharged mobile gaming, Internet of Things technology, and a smarter, better-connected world to consumers’ fingertips. As 5G rapidly evolves and brings new possibilities, it presents a wealth of opportunities for mobile network operators (MNOs) to differentiate their services with high performance applications; and for wireline operators to deliver differentiated backhaul transport services, but they need to act quickly.

Why Cisco embraces Elastic for IT infrastructure transparency

This post is a recap of a presentation given at ElasticON 2020. Interested in seeing more talks like this? Check out the conference archive. Network infrastructure is the engine that drives a company’s business. As companies scale, assets that compose this infrastructure become more complex to manage. That means there’s more hardware, more software, and more subscriptions and services that require tracking.

How to Dynamically Auto-Steer your Traffic to Multi-CDN or Multiple Data-Centers

Whether it’s Cyber Monday deals or streaming the Super Bowl to millions of users, website’s traffic management & SRE teams often struggle to deliver a reliable user experience. Multi-CDN strategy is critical & integral to this process and is often determined by the following factors.

11 Types of Networks: Understanding the Differences

As the number of connected personal and IoT devices skyrockets across the world, the demand for high-speed, high-performance networks continues to climb and transform how people and businesses connect. Over the years, this technological growth has triggered the development of different types of networks to meet shifting demands, and it’s likely that with future technological advancement, more network topologies will continue to emerge.

Features to check for in a network scanner for enterprise networks

Network scanners have become an integral part of every IT admin’s first line of defense against security breaches. Using the right network scanner tool to conduct effective network reconnaissance and diagnosis enables you to pinpoint network issues that can escalate to security risks and network mishaps. A typical network scanner would allow you to scan a range of IP addresses sequentially, and display the active devices within that address block.

Incident Communication Is a Key Part of Resolving Network Issues

You’ve just received a notification—a major network issue has occurred. Hoping it’s a false positive, you complete an initial triage. Dang it! It’s the real thing. If you’re like me, your mind likely turns to one thing: fixing the issue as fast as you can. But hold on! Before you turn completely to fixing it, there’s another important aspect to any incident that you can’t forget, and that’s incident communication.

HAProxy Monitoring (the InfluxDB Way)

My personal experience with HAProxy dates back to my work with a previous company, where we used HAProxy to do load balancing between pairs of servers with specific roles. Those servers are the core of the major payment gateway in Uruguay, where thousands of users use them every day to pay their bills, recharge their mobile phones, pay parking fees, and even play lottery numbers.