Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

May 2021

Costa Rican educational org realizes improved visibility into its IT infrastructure, enhanced IT health and performance

The Ministry of Public Education (MEP) serving Costa Rica is an educational organization with 80,000 employees. MEP is the technical and administrative body responsible for the accreditation, supervision, auditing, inspection, and control of private schools, beginning with preschool. The problems faced MEP is a government agency supported by five data centers and 181 servers.

Comparing The Private Connectivity Offerings Of AWS, Google Cloud & Microsoft Azure

AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure accounted for an estimated 58% of total cloud spend in Q1 2021. Businesses are considering ways to improve their connectivity to these three leading hyperscale providers - and are increasingly turning to private connectivity. In this blog, we take a look at the private connectivity offerings of AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.

Packet Loss Testing and Reducing Guide + Recommended Tools

If you’ve ever encountered a slow file download or a frozen/lagging video, you’ve experienced packet loss. Under certain circumstances, these might be minor inconveniences, but packet loss on a larger scale can be financially detrimental to businesses. Fortunately, there are steps you can take to diagnose and reduce packet loss. In this article, we provide some background on why packet loss occurs before sharing five of the best network monitoring solutions on the market to combat the issue.

Understanding Load Balancing Essentials

In this post we’ll review some of the essential ideas in Load Balancing to help you understand how to get the best configuration for your application. Load balancing is an essential part of any application deployment to provide high availability, performance and security. We’ll focus on understanding and selecting scheduling and persistence algorithms and using the new LoadMaster Network Telemetry feature to validate the results.

Turn your home office into a NOC room with Philips Hue and Grafana

I recently got a couple of Philips Hue Play lights to spice up my home office setup, and after a bit of tinkering with the APIs, I decided it would be a fun project to create my own personal NOC room, using them to visualize the status of some system I’m monitoring.

The What and The Why of TLS Inspection

Connecting to nearly any web page today, you’re more often to see a URL that begins with “https://” instead of “http://”. Wondered what the “S” is for? It stands for “secure”, but more importantly, it identifies that the connection is taking place over a secure channel using the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol. But what is TLS, and beyond that, what’s a TLS inspection?

Building a complete network security checklist

Understanding what to audit in a network can be chaotic and confusing. Building a complete network security checklist is crucial for organizations with computers connected to the internet or to each other. Think of it like an antivirus scan you might run on your computer to find Trojans or malware, except you’re scanning your entire network to find anything that may cripple it.

How to Manage Network Configurations + Best Software to Automate Configuration Management

Businesses both small and large require agility in how they handle device firmware and network configurations. For large networks especially, manual monitoring and change implementation can be inefficient. As such, more and more IT departments turn to automated network configuration management tools with bulk change capabilities.

Understanding The Move To Intelligent Networking

More CIOs are seeing the value of network automation, which can improve network efficiency and cost, as well as help them manage increasingly complex IT environments. But like the adoption of any new technology, network automation presents a number of challenges and considerations for CIOs. In our recent webinar, PCCW Global’s CTO Paul Gampe and VP of Development and Operations Jay Turner shared some tips and insights into how to begin the move to intelligent networking…

Visualize HAProxy Metrics with InfluxDB

HAProxy generates over a hundred metrics to give you a nearly real-time view of the state of your load balancers and the services they proxy, but to get the most from this data, you need a way to visualize it. InfluxData’s InfluxDB suite of applications takes the many discrete data points that make up HAProxy metrics and turns them into time-series data, which is then collected and graphed, giving you insight into the workings of your systems and services.

How to Benchmark SaaS Performance for reducing MTTR

Exoprise CloudReady effectively benchmarks SaaS application and network capacity performance through the power of crowd intelligence. This unique approach covers a variety of useful metrics for IT administrators such as Network RTT, Audio Jitter, SharePoint Health, Server Latency, Login Times, etc. Combining application monitoring and end-to-end network diagnostics with the power of crowd-sourced data analytics provides complete visibility into business-critical cloud services as well as insights into the health of the Internet. Reduce MTTR and accelerate troubleshooting during outages by instantly finding bottlenecks in the service delivery chain.

SNMPv2 vs. SNMPv3: An SNMP Versions Comparison Table

By 2024 there’ll be an estimated 83 billion connected devices on our networks. All these devices, made by a wide variety of vendors, use different types of software, making everything more complicated for IT staff trying to get network devices working together. Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) acts like a magic wand to untangle that ball of yarn with a simple gesture.

SolarWinds Partners With QBS to Enable Businesses to Address IT Challenges of Today

"Our work with partners like QBS Software will enable us to help organisations adapt to changes, reducing complexity and delivering significant benefits for businesses of all sizes" - Charles Damerell, senior director sales at SolarWinds.

Understanding The Benefits & Risks Of The Interconnected Enterprise Model

The interconnected enterprise model is a natural response to the high frequency change that we are seeing across multiple industries. Today’s enterprises are now find themselves interconnected with a vast pool of cloud and SaaS providers as well as other business partners, which allows organisations to adapt more rapidly to changing market conditions and opportunities. But like any business model, this presents risks and challenges as well as its rewards…

Deeper Visibility Into Complex Devices | THWACK Livecast Series Session #2

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. Attendees will learn how to leverage SolarWinds tools to communicate clearly and concisely to management, end users, or even ISPs.

Introduction to open source private LTE and 5G networks

It’s so easy these days to set-up your own WiFi network. You order a router online, plug it into the electrical socket, define a password and you’re good to go. WiFi is fast, reliable and easy to use. But if you want to cover a wider area or connect hundreds of small devices it quickly becomes inefficient and expensive. Is the only way to go to your local mobile network operator and sign a contract? No! Thanks to open source technology, you can build your own LTE or 5G network.

Science of Network Anomalies

Today’s networks have evolved a long way since their early days and have become rather complicated systems that comprise numerous different network devices, protocols, and applications. Consequently, it is practically impossible to have a complete overview of what is happening in the network or whether everything in the network works as it should. Eventually, network problems will arise.

Secure Monitoring - Open TCP Ports are a Security Risk

I’ve been updating some of our security documentation explaining what we do to ensure our product is suitable for the security models in regulated industries, such as finance and healthcare. Talking to our security guys, I was flabbergasted to find out that there are monitoring products out there that go against what is not only an industry best practice but also the right thing to do: agents that open and listen on fixed TCP ports!

Enhance NOC Alerts With Incident Management and Alert Automation

In a network operations center (NOC), alerts originating from hundreds of servers, application monitoring systems, emails and ticketing services compete to catch a NOC analyst’s attention. NOCs face many challenges in parsing through alerts to identify actionable notifications and mobilize the right response team into action.

Announcing HAProxy 2.4

HAProxy 2.4 adds exciting features such as support for HTTP/2 WebSockets, authorization and routing of MQTT and FIX (Financial Information Exchange) protocol messages, DNS resolution over TCP, server timeouts that you can change on the fly, dynamic SSL certificate storage for client certificates sent to backend servers, and an improved cache; it adds a built-in OpenTracing integration, new Prometheus metrics, and circuit breaking improvements.

6 Best Tools for Automated Network Management + Guide

In today’s technology-driven world, network automation tools have evolved from convenience to necessity in practically every IT field. Traditionally, IT managers would issue manual command lines to manage networks, but given the size of today’s business networks, manual workflows dealing with repetitive network tasks have become time-consuming and counterproductive, often at risk of incurring errors from manual implementation.

7 Strategies to Contain Network Costs (Layer 6 Will Amaze You)

First, thanks for indulging the clickbait title joke. Serialization is the unsung hero of harmonizing network and application relations and deserves the occasional, snarky callout. Moreover, identifying how the unique mix of network clients in your environment consume your carefully manicured infrastructure is critical for managing network cost. Because today, a rapidly expanding, diverse pile of new technologies all assume the network is a magic grid, no tuning required.

What is Network Congestion? Common Causes and How to Fix Them

There are few areas of networking so problematic, and at the same time so fixable, as network congestion. Understanding the common causes network congestion causes can help you detect them, fix them, and keep them from cropping up again. Network congestion is generally seen by the end-user as “network slow down”, or response times on our computer not being up to par.

Announcing HAProxy Data Plane API 2.3

The HAProxy Data Plane API 2.3 expands its service discovery mechanisms and introduces native support for discovering AWS EC2 instances and auto-scaling groups. It also adds a new configuration file that supports HCL and YAML, an Inotify configuration watcher, and Syslog support. HAProxy Data Plane API version 2.3 is now available and you will find it in the 2.3 version of the Alpine Docker image.

What is a Backplane? A Network Backplane Throughput Primer

Bottlenecks and performance issues are the bane of network engineers everywhere. They can be hard to nail down, have a variety of different potential root causes, and give people an excuse to “blame the network”. Understanding network backplanes, backplane throughput, and concepts like blocking vs non-blocking switches, can help you better understand network design and troubleshoot bottlenecks when they come up.

Auvik Presents: Secure IT Operations

In this webinar, we bring IT Ops and IT Security together and discuss what you can do to address two of the biggest struggles that keep so many IT pros awake at night: maintaining the technology you manage, and ensuring that same technology is secure. Presented by Destiny Bertucci, Product Marketing Manager, and Steve Petryschuk, Technology Advocate Interested in improving your operations with the help of network monitoring and management software? Auvik is incredibly easy to set up and super simple to use.

Self-Care Tips for IT Pros: Invest in Sleep (And a Good Chair)

As an IT pro, you are your most valuable asset. Obviously, if you aren’t taking care of yourself, how can you be expected to perform with typical sustained, easy awesomeness? Are you able to extricate your IT self from the myriad reactive activities central to IT roles? It’s easy to proclaim taking care of yourself should always be your number one priority.

The Value of Ingesting Firewall Logs

In this article, we are going to explore the process of ingesting logs into your data lake, and the value of importing your firewall logs into Coralogix. To understand the value of the firewall logs, we must first understand what data is being exported. A typical layer 3 firewall will export the source IP address, destination IP address, ports and the action for example allow or deny. A layer 7 firewall will add more metadata to the logs including application, user, location, and more.

The Top Networking Certifications Guide for 2021

The technology industry is predicted to reach a $5 trillion valuation in 2021, an additional 4% growth over 2020. This steady growth of the industry has, unsurprisingly, led to an increase in the number of jobs in networking and IT. As the last year has shown, when an enterprise is forced to switch work models to a remote or distributed approach, they need network specialists to set up and maintain the necessary infrastructure.

Announcing Ribbon Voice Sync for Regional and Rural Service Providers

Regional and rural providers are challenged every day to keep their network together. Time, obsolescence, razor-thin margins, and changing customer expectations are conspiring to pull it apart. Watch on-demand to learn how Ribbon is synchronizing multiple elements of our portfolio into a new and better solution for regional and rural providers.

Anodot Helps CSPs Jump-Start Zero-Touch Network Monitoring

Anodot’s autonomous network monitoring platform provides the ability to monitor cross-layer network performance and service experience in one platform. We collect all data types, at any scale, and use AI/ML to correlate anomalies across the entire telco stack. Our platform is the "brain" on top of the OSS that detects service-impacting incidents in real time. We help customers like T-Mobile and Megafon protect their revenue and improve service experience - reducing the number of alerts by 90% and shortening Time-to-Resolve incidents by 30%.

An Overview of the Cost Savings and Business Benefits with Auvik

If you’re an Auvik user, you’ve likely come to realize our software can provide value to your business in more ways than one. From automating tedious and repetitive tasks like documentation and config backup, to cutting down on troubleshooting time, Auvik’s cloud-based network monitoring and management system gives you true network visibility and control.

Announcing HAProxy Kubernetes Ingress Controller 1.6

We’re proud to announce the release version 1.6 of the HAProxy Kubernetes Ingress Controller. This version provides the ability to add raw configuration snippets to HAProxy frontends, allows for ACL/Map files to be managed through a ConfigMap, and enables complex routing decisions to be made based on anything found within the request headers or metadata.