If you manage a network, every network device generates a large volume of logs. These logs are extremely important and narrate a story about both events and the sequencing of those events within your network. This capability is critical for any network monitoring software, helping you easily understand network activities, user actions, security breaches, and much more.

In this episode of Network AF, your podcast host Avi Freedman chats with networking investor, advisor and VC partner, Alan Cohen. Alan brings a hilarious, witty and nonconformist attitude to the talk, exploring Silicon Valley in the 90s, the joy of moving from large enterprises to small disruptors, and generously sharing secrets of the trade with Avi and podcast listeners.

Designed at the dawn of the commercial internet, the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is a policy-based routing protocol that has long been an established part of the internet infrastructure. Historically, BGP was primarily of interest to ISPs and hosting service providers whose revenue depends on delivering traffic.

Change is critical to growth. Especially if you’re running a business in today’s volatile market. The silver lining is that we are at the peak of innovation, moving forward from a decade filled with disruptions, catalysing transformations. Over the years, enterprise IT has evolved to play a more significant role in business. Innovation, macro-economic factors, unexpected disruptions, and other internal and external factors have caused the change.

Network monitoring tools are an important part of any network management strategy since it gives you valuable information about network-related issues that could damage your business. Overloaded networks, router difficulties, downtime, cybercrime, and data loss are all dangers that can be mitigated by frequently monitoring networks.

According to ABC News, there has been a 600% rise in security intrusions during the COVID-19 pandemic, which is expected to double before 2025. In many circumstances, admins and technicians either intentionally or unintentionally play a part in the process of derailing the organization’s strategy for success. In order to prevent such mishaps, MSPs need a recovery plan to recuperate from any unfortunate accidents or cyberattacks.

The focus of the 2.5 version was on expanding support for HAProxy configuration keywords, and that’s where most of the effort during this release cycle was spent. We will continue doing that during the next couple of versions to gain complete feature parity with both the HAProxy configuration and Runtime API so that you can use the Data Plane API as a full-featured way to configure HAProxy.

We’ve all been stuck in traffic congestion on the road at some point in our lives. Traffic congestion may happen when there’s too many cars on the road, when there’s an accident or a closed street. Network congestion isn’t too different from that - but instead of cars causing congestion, it’s a different type of traffic. That’s why, in this article, we’re running you through how to detect network congestion with Network Monitoring tools.

Though you may be approaching SD-WAN with great anticipation, the old adage, ‘fail to prepare, prepare to fail’ has never been more relevant. Embarking on an SD-WAN project can be a complex process that requires a great deal of forward planning.

The peering coordinator’s toolbox is a blog series where we dive deep into the peering coordinator workflow and show how the right tools can help you be successful in your role.

This blog continues our best CDN series. Today we will be analyzing CDN performance and uptime in the Great White North (aka Canada) within the last seven and 30 days. Let’s get started! Tip: Are you new to CDNs? Visit our What is a CDN resource to learn more.

Looking to build your basic IT knowledge in 2022? In this post we'll cover some general network monitoring and network management best practices that MSPs and IT departments use to support their organizations. Any discussion about IT is eventually going to lead towards network monitoring and management. All told, one of the most well-understood roles of an IT department or IT provider is that of keeping a business’ essential systems up and running.

For-Each is a new feature added to the DX Unified Infrastructure Management’s (DX UIM) Monitoring Configuration Service (MCS) that uses the device attributes with one or multiple values. MCS will loop through each value and create a profile for each one. If that attribute does not exist for a device, no profile will be created. Similarly, if a new value is added or removed from a device, MCS will revaluate and add or remove profiles.

Ensuring that networks and the applications they enable are performing as well as they should is a full-time and challenging task for system administrators. We've all encountered scenarios in which end-users complain that an application is slow. Then the network team says it's not their problem, and the development team (or third-party application vendor) also says it's not their problem either.

A web application firewall is an HTTP-level firewall that protects your application against well-known attacks and exploits. Using WAF, you can block traffic to your applications from certain origins and detect and block common attacks from reaching your application.

As the demand for media-rich content grows, so do the performance expectations of consumers. One of the greatest challenges online businesses face is to deliver large amounts of content to audiences spread out across the globe as quickly as possible. The solution is a content delivery network (CDN).

In this blog, we’ll be continuing our series on best-performing CDNs by country. Today’s focus is on Russia. This analysis compares CDN performance and RUM uptime metrics grouped by data sources within the last seven and 30 days of this writing. First things first.

Load balancing is an indispensable technique for improving a website’s performance. I’ll explain why. With Firefox’s Web Developer Tools open, I visited a popular retailer’s website to see how many HTTP requests my browser made when loading the site. In this case, I counted 119 requests needed to render the landing page.

2022, the world is the technological paradise you always dreamed of. Space mining, smart cities, 3D printers to make your own Darth Vader mask… Just a little problem, society is based on digitization and communications and you have no idea about the visibility of distributed networks. Something of vital importance considering the rise of cybercrime. Well, don’t worry, we’ll help you.

Digital transformation is causing the IT ecosphere to evolve, and the evolution is being accelerated by competitive necessity. Enterprises are using digital technology to increase revenue and lower costs. Failure to compete effectively will have devastating consequences. Digital transformation requires that IT evolve from a cost center to a value creator. FinOps and DevOps are processes that include the entire enterprise in value creation.

Human operators utilizing traditional network monitoring software with methods like SNMP, ping, or flow tracking are still limited to diagnosis and triage issues within the four walls of the on-premise data center. But with increased adoption of cloud, SD-WAN and “work from anywhere,” application workloads are getting more distributed and creating network monitoring visibility gaps.

In a new episode of the Network AF podcast, your host Avi Freedman interviews Hank Kilmer, VP of IP engineering at Cogent. Hank has been running major internet backbones since the early 90s. He joined Cogent in 2011, and prior to that, held leadership positions with UUNET (now Verizon), Sprint, Digex, Abovenet and Terrapin Communications.

The peering coordinator’s toolbox is a blog series where we dive deep into the peering coordinator workflow and show how the right tools can help you be successful in your role.

The need for in-depth network monitoring is growing exponentially as organizations expand in size and more companies are established. Increased monitoring needs demand a feature-rich tool to simplify networks and get a clear view of their underlying infrastructure. Diagnosing network faults and ensuring a well-balanced operation of all network devices is the primary task of a network admin any day.

The online marketplace grows more competitive by the day—especially for content-rich websites and applications. As America has the third-largest amount of internet users by population (next to China and India), a sizeable portion of global online activity is generated from the United States. America also happens to be the world’s current largest national economy.

When it comes to the internet, understanding the global ecosystem can be tough. There’s a lot of manual work that service providers and digital businesses have traditionally put into finding the best way to reach customers over IP networks. And more work is needed for benchmarking against competitors and finding the best relationships for peering.

Ah, the romance of the railroad. Conductors shouting “all aboard”, watching the countryside whizz by, dining cars and sleeper cars, boxcars, the Orient Express, bullet trains, chasm-spanning bridges, the clickety clack of the rails, clang clang at the crossings, and the engineer waving from the caboose. As we near the two hundred year mark of the first passenger train in 1825, we can observe that railways, our oldest modern means of mass transportation, are as strong as ever.

The increasing adoption of modern and cloud-native architectures is enabling enterprises with IT infrastructure that is more dynamic and ephemeral, and thus more resilient. This trend drives infrastructure monitoring tools to transition from simply “keeping the lights on” to providing advanced insights such as predictive analytics for infrastructure workload optimization. Infrastructure monitoring that was once art has become science.

You’d be right to think that Tesla’s technology surely wouldn’t go wrong, especially with the huge amounts of media coverage it gets. But in 2021, Tesla suffered a few awkward technological faults. You may have read that Tesla went offline which lead to customers around the world reporting issues around gaining access to their cars.

“Automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.” – Bill Gates A network, as we all know, is the connection of multiple devices to share information between them. While it’s a major task to manually manage every device connected to a network, a software-based feature called network automation can be utilized to help overcome this challenge.

When monitoring network performance, the metric that we most commonly hear about is Speed. Everyone wants to know how fast their network is performing, but what if you need more detail? Keep reading to find out how to monitor network speed and more using Network Monitoring.

In our daily life we can face different difficulties. From spilling coffee on our clean shirt just before leaving home to not finding an emoji that satisfies us to answer that someone we like. Stupid little things compared to how difficult it is sometimes to identify network problems for an external IT provider.

In today’s world, businesses depend on the internet and networks for nearly all their operations. Most large-scale corporations from banks to IT services have their critical operations built around a network. With network types ranging from wired and wireless to virtual environments, network management has only become increasingly complex, and network administrators need all the help they can get.

Every load balancer you’ll find on the market must deliver performance, reliability, scalability, and security, and do it better than its competitors. Each must solve complex programming challenges that address those needs—choices that will affect the direction of the project for years to come. HAProxy is no different. When evaluating whether you should choose HAProxy or something else, it helps to know how project contributors answered the big, architectural questions.

The peering coordinator’s toolbox is a blog series where we’ll dive deep into the peering coordinator workflow and show how the right tools can help you be successful in your role. A peering coordinator is the person responsible for the way an IP network connects to the rest of the internet.

You have to capture everything to investigate security issues thoroughly, right? More often than not, data that at one time was labeled irrelevant and thrown away is found to be the missing piece of the puzzle when investigating a malicious attacker or the source of an information leak. So, you need to capture every network packet.

Understanding the needs of your network is vital to keep your network up and running. In the wake of the remote work era, it’s important to monitor and plan your bandwidth utilization. Recent surveys have reported a 45% increase in VoIP and video traffic as the need for telecommuting has doubled since the pandemic. Business Wire, a broadband provider, also reported a 30% spike in data traffic and a 50% rise in voice traffic since mid-March.

In your career, if your role has ever included the monitoring or managing of any network infrastructure devices such as switches, routers, firewalls, etc., you’ve very likely heard of SNMP. In case you haven’t, SNMP stands for Simple Network Management Protocol, and, unlike its name suggests, it is anything but simple. It is a standard protocol for collecting information from network devices and organizing it in a way that humans can (sort of) understand.

Our networks are always changing and evolving. Network Testing for higher speeds, better application and network device performance, and after a new service deployment or migration, helps us understand the impact of changes on our network. In this article, we’re running you through how to test network performance using Network Testing and Monitoring tools.

Broadcom officially closed on the acquisition of AppNeta on Jan 31, 2022. This marks a new beginning for AppNeta and the Broadcom network monitoring software business. AppNeta will take the lead in our vision to enable Network Visibility Anywhere, focusing especially on operational blind spots and experience in the last mile. We aim to ensure a quality digital experience anywhere while working, transacting, communicating and automating.