Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

April 2021

Featured Post

How the technology gap grew during 2020

Even before the emergence of a global pandemic that disrupted and catalysed modern workplace IT, IT professionals were under pressure. In a few years, many have learned to deliver more new technologies and advanced services than perhaps in the previous decade. Today's hybrid, distributed tech environments already pressured even senior admins to equip themselves with new skills to adapt to these changes and manage systems confidently.

Network Observability for Distributed Services

Mike Cohen, Splunk’s head of product management for network monitoring, joins theCube’s John Furrier for a conversation about how networks are an untapped source of data to help your organization achieve observability — and how to unlock that potential. Watch this segment of Leading With Observability on theCube to learn about addressing the gaps in your visibility, including: The ins and outs of monitoring metrics, distributed tracing and correlating logs with no management complexity

How to Monitor Zoom Network Performance | Obkio

Zoom’s popularity has skyrocketed over the past year. It’s not only an application that we use for convenience, but for many of us, we rely on it for everyday conversation VoIP Quality and unified communication applications, like Zoom, can be drastically impacted by poor network performance. So monitoring network performance helps you identify performance issues & improve your Zoom performance.

How To - Monitor Split Tunnel Traffic with Catchpoint

When the world transitioned to a remote workspace, one of the things that most of us figured out quickly was that some applications just don’t work well with corporate VPN. Video and voice applications, like Microsoft Teams, are essential to business operations. I wouldn’t want to add another point of failure that I’d need to troubleshoot if I didn’t have to.

Using Coralogix to Gain Insights From Your FortiGate Logs

FortiGate, a next-generation firewall from IT Cyber Security leaders Fortinet, provides the ultimate threat protection for businesses of all sizes. FortiGate helps you understand what is happening on your network, and informs you about certain network activities, such as the detection of a virus, a visit to an invalid website, an intrusion, a failed login attempt, and myriad others. This post will show you how Coralogix can provide analytics and insights for your FortiGate logs.

Have Your Say in the new Idea Portal

We’re excited to announce the launch of the all-new idea portal. A place where great ideas can grow, build support, and help shape the future of Auvik. The idea portal allows us to collect your suggestions while keeping you informed of what we’re working on, and what we’re planning to implement next. We can’t wait for your input! Simply put, the Auvik idea portal is your chance to share ideas with the Auvik product team, request new features, and vote on the ideas you really like.

Autoscaling with the HAProxy Kubernetes Ingress Controller and KEDA

One of the greatest strengths of containers is the ability to spin more of them up quickly. As the volume of traffic to your application increases, you can create more application containers on the fly to handle it, in almost no time at all. Kubernetes ships with autoscaling baked in, giving you the power to scale out when the system detects an increase in traffic—automatically!

N-central Integration with Microsoft Intune

Configure Microsoft Intune device policies and get a clear view of all your customers’ devices right from your N-central dashboard. Manage your Microsoft Intune devices right from your N-able™ N-central® dashboard. Harmonize configurations and policies for all selected devices—including Intune devices—from centralized status dashboards in one place. Generate consolidated reports for devices managed by both Intune and N‑able.

Five Ways Containerized eSBCs Optimize Teams, Zoom & Other Cloud Communications Deployments

Enterprises are using Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) solutions like Microsoft Teams and Zoom, and Contact Center as a Service Solutions (CCaaS) like Five9 and Genesys to improve communications, simplify operations, and accelerate IT agility. As the COVID-19 outbreak clearly demonstrated, UCaaS and CCaaS solutions are ideal for delivering enterprise communications services to remote workers, mobile users, and small/home offices.

Five Ways Containerized eSBCs Optimize Teams, Zoom & Other Cloud Communications Deployments

Enterprises are using Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) solutions like Microsoft Teams and Zoom, and Contact Center as a Service Solutions (CCaaS) like Five9 and Genesys to improve communications, simplify operations, and accelerate IT agility. As the COVID-19 outbreak clearly demonstrated, UCaaS and CCaaS solutions are ideal for delivering enterprise communications services to remote workers, mobile users, and small/home offices.

How a customer turned digital transformation success with Elastic into a partnership opportunity

Our journey with Elastic began with a search for a single monitoring platform service for all kinds of applications and infrastructure across geographies and in the cloud. Like many other organizations who use Elastic, our story does not end there.

How to Find IP Addresses on a Network and Monitoring their Usage

Experts predict that by 2025 we’ll have more than 75 billion connected devices, a number almost triple that recorded in 2019. With networks becoming far more dynamic and complex than ever before, the ability to find IP addresses on the network is essential. As well, people are connecting to company networks with an ever-increasing number of devices, leading to increased risk not only in security but also in maintenance and management.

NGINX Ingress Controller Template

We set out with a plan this year to nurture and grow our developer ecosystem. In 2020, we launched our Template Library to empower joint users of LogDNA and our partners to have an out-of-the-box logging experience from every layer of their stack. As the use of these templates has grown, users have told us that they save them time from manually creating Views, Boards, and Screens, and helps them gain insight from their logs much quicker.

How to Find and Fix IP Address Conflicts

IP address conflicts are an example of textbook “network problems”. There are multiple causes for IP conflicts, and, to make things even more fun, the behavior of devices experiencing an IP conflict can vary. Let’s explore IP conflicts in depth to help better understand what they are, why they occur, and how to fix IP address conflicts. An IP address conflict is a common network issue that occurs when two or more devices on the same network have the same IP.

DHCP server monitoring made easy with OpUtils

In today’s complex IT infrastructures, Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) servers play an indispensable role in automating IP allocation and configuration. A DHCP server’s capacity to allocate IPs to the requesting clients in real-time is one of the factors that ensures constant uptime of dynamic networks. However, even though a network’s availability depends on them, DHCP servers are often not closely monitored by IT teams.

N-able (Formerly SolarWinds MSP) Announces Partnership with DNSFilter to Help MSPs Protect Customers from Online Security Threats with Advanced DNS Technology

N-able (formerly SolarWinds MSP), the purpose-built partner for managed services providers (MSPs), has announced a collaboration with DNSFilter to integrate its cloud-based security solution with N-able™ N-central® and RMM, providing MSPs with threat protection and content filtering.

Power Your Consul Service Mesh with HAProxy

Many of you use HashiCorp Consul for service discovery. It makes connecting one backend application or service to another easy: Your Consul servers store a catalog of addresses to all of your services; when an application within the network wants to discover where a service is listening, it asks Consul, which gives it the address.

THWACK Livecast Series - Session 1: Keeping Your ISP Honest and Troubleshooting SaaS Applications

During this THWACK® Livecast series, we'll highlight SolarWinds network management tools designed to help IT professionals navigate increasing complexity with easy-to-use unified solutions. At SolarWinds, we create solutions to help users develop better team collaboration to tackle complex issues and reduce mean time to resolution. Using interconnected modules, users can troubleshoot network connectivity issues across the entire delivery chain, hybrid environments, advanced devices, and applications.

Troubleshooting Firewall Issues in DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean is a cost-effective virtual private server (VPS) provider popular among the developer community. The platform also offers services for rapid development, deployment, testing, and maintaining modern distributed applications. One of these services is a managed firewall solution that allows blocking unwanted traffic. It’s relatively easy to manage and deploy as an infrastructure component. Sometimes, however, operations teams need to dig deeper when the firewall blocks network traffic.

The SolarWinds 5 Essential IT Tools Pack Overview

Discover the 5 must-have IT management tools for your business. The SolarWinds® 5 Essential IT Tools Pack contains basic management and monitoring software to get even the smallest IT operation up and running. The pack includes: Web Help Desk®, Dameware® Remote Support, Serv-U® FTP Server, ipMonitor®, and Engineer’s Toolset™.

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Multipath World

Picture a network—any enterprise network. What do you see? In almost every case, in almost every environment, you’ll find hubs and spokes of hubs and spokes all the way down. For network engineers, their focus may be even more narrow: innumerable clients, lots of switches, and fewer routers connected to a core. This classic on-prem topology has served reliably since the dawn of Unix time.

Network Firewall Security: Monitoring Firewalls 101

Installing a firewall onto your network is “good network firewall security”, right? Let’s be clear, it’s not – it’s the start to good security. While installing a firewall is an important component of security in a network firewall security posture, there’s much more to the process than just dropping in a piece of hardware, or enabling some new software.

What is an ARP Table?

ARP (Address Resolution Protocol) is the protocol that bridges Layer 2 and Layer 3 of the OSI model, which in the typical TCP/IP stack is effectively gluing together the Ethernet and Internet Protocol layers. This critical function allows for the discovery of a devices’ MAC (media access control) address based on its known IP address. By extension, an ARP table is simply the method for storing the information discovered through ARP.

ThousandEyes Intelligence in AppDynamics Dash Studio Demo

ThousandEyes Internet and Cloud Intelligence in AppDynamics Dash Studio combines the network and internet performance metrics from ThousandEyes into AppDynamics Dash Studio, AppDynamics’ next generation dashboarding experience. This video shows how the solution provides a common operating language for network, application, and cloud teams to quickly isolate and resolve issues across the entire application delivery ecosystem, enabling them to deliver world-class digital experiences.

6 Best Bandwidth Monitoring Tools

Your network relies on reliable data transmission. Not only could troublesome connections yield negative results for customers, but connectivity issues could also indicate deeper problems within your network. However, if you monitor your bandwidth consistently and carefully, you can maintain your network’s health and solve issues as they arise.

Troubleshooting Firewall Issues in DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean is a cost-effective virtual private server (VPS) provider popular among the developer community. The platform also offers services for rapid development, deployment, testing, and maintaining modern distributed applications. One of these services is a managed firewall solution that allows blocking unwanted traffic. It’s relatively easy to manage and deploy as an infrastructure component. Sometimes, however, operations teams need to dig deeper when the firewall blocks network traffic.

How to Monitor Router Traffic: 6 Router Monitoring Tips

When you’re in the networking technology field, you’re going to find that there are many different types of “monitors” (like router monitoring) that you need to stay on top of, from throughput to application performance and device health. And as you become more knowledgeable, you’re going to start to understand these diverse types of traffic and equipment. It’ll become more important to you to be able to understand concepts like where traffic is flowing.

HAProxy Forwards Over 2 Million HTTP Requests per Second on a Single Arm-based AWS Graviton2 Instance

For the first time, a software load balancer exceeds 2-million RPS on a single Arm instance. A few weeks ago, while I was working on an HAProxy issue related to thread locking contention, I found myself running some tests on a server with an 8-core, 16-thread Intel Xeon W2145 processor that we have in our lab. Although my intention wasn’t to benchmark the proxy, I observed HAProxy reach 1.03 million HTTP requests per second.

9 Best Network Discovery Tools

Your organization’s network is large, complicated, and constantly expanding. While you might think you have a handle on it, manually monitoring your network can lead to inaccuracies due to outdated data, undetected devices, and other common visibility issues. A network device discovery tool can help you find devices on a network to manage your device’s health, troubleshoot performance problems, and prepare for your network’s future.

Enabling Profitable Business Services through OTN Switching

OTN Switching in the Access can change the equation for offering attractively-priced L1 business services. By eliminating the complexities of muxponders and transponders, DWDM optical and traffic engineering, OTN switching technology can enable most common services over a greatly simplified architecture. Efficiencies can be achieved in both capital as well as in operational costs allowing a competitive edge to your services portfolio.

5 Best Network Uptime Monitoring Software

A slow website or unreliable server caused by uptime issues within your network can drive away potential customers and could be costly and time-consuming to address if it happens repeatedly. A network uptime monitor will enable you to detect, diagnose, and aptly solve problems related to uptime while continuously observing your devices and automatically updating data visualizations.

Network Design and Best Practices

With networks at the heart of the most modern business, network design can have a major impact on business outcomes. Finding the right balance of network performance, security, redundancy, and cost require a unique mix of project management and technical skill. To help you nail your next network design project, we’ll take a deep dive on the topic, provide a basic framework you can follow, and look at some best practices to keep in mind as you go.

Network Monitoring and Its Best Practices

All networks, no matter how sophisticated, are vulnerable to attack from outsiders. They can also face compromise from poor program integration, outdated software, lagging connections, and insufficient bandwidth. These issues impede the efficiency of your workforce and can frustrate clients who depend on reaching you through reliable communication methods. A technologically advanced network needs constant attention to run at peak efficiency.

Network Performance Monitoring: The Tools and Strategies

In this post, we are going to look at different tools and strategies for Network Performance Monitoring. To follow along with this blog article, make sure to book a demo and sign up for MetricFire's free trial where a lot of our customers are doing network performance monitoring using Hosted Graphite and Prometheus service. These tools are part of MetricFire’s offering.

Network Integration: Moving from Reactive to Proactive with Mature Processes

Auvik and Cherwell recently co-hosted an information-packed webinar to answer some important network integration questions facing network managers: How do we get ahead of our workload and how do we know where to start? Let’s look at some of the key takeaways from the webinar (you can watch here) on how to move from a proactive to a reactive network operation model, how network integration solutions can help put out fires faster, and when to incorporate tools to automate processes.

Conquering the Next Normal: Monitoring Techniques to Keep Up With the Pace of Change in 2021

In 2020, IT pros across the globe had to make snap decisions to keep the business running. Now, organizations are revisiting those decisions, ensuring they work as expected and adjusting as needed. The unavoidable truth is the only way to know how things are operating now is to monitor them. The question in the mind of many IT practitioners is whether monitoring solutions are up to the task of encompassing the vast array of technical solutions organizations embraced in the last year.

Web Server Monitoring Your Application on Nginx with Logz.io

A big topic of interest nowadays is web application monitoring. Application performance monitoring and log analytics are required by businesses of all sizes to ensure their web applications’ smooth operation. If your application serves as the backend for your business processes, it is critical for your organization. You need to know, in real-time, when and why it breaks. To answer these questions, we will use Logz.io products to monitor a simple web application served by Nginx.

Featured Post

The Unprecedented Transformation of IT Goals in 2020

At the end of 2019, IT pros were making bold predictions about what 2020 would hold. But they weren't bold enough-time makes fools of us all, and hot takes fizzled rather than sizzled. From the continued evolution of smart devices and blockchain's continued rise in prominence to the falling price of compute workloads, there was rational thinking behind the predictions made at the end of 2019.

Resolve Network and VPN Performance Problems Faster with Endpoint Monitoring

IT professionals are now adapting to remote environments and learning to manage a distributed, homebound workforce. In recent conversations with IT pros, many have cited that connectivity/VPN and home network issues are their top challenges but they lack the visibility to diagnose and troubleshoot these problems. Catchpoint for employee experience monitoring gives IT teams what they need: visibility from remote users’ devices to any business-critical application across any network.

Explore NGINX usage, performance, and transactions to increase customer experience

If your team falls into the majority of organizations that use NGINX – which remains the world’s most popular Web server – to host websites and Web applications, monitoring NGINX usage, performance, and transactions is critical for maintaining a positive end-user experience. Keep reading for tips on doing so. This article identifies the most important metrics to monitor for NGINX in order to understand key usage and performance trends within NGINX transactions.