Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

April 2022

How to Ensure Microsoft Teams Meeting Reliability

Dependence on Microsoft Teams has never been greater, and the pressure is on for IT teams to deliver exceptional user experiences – anytime, anywhere. In this series of videos, we explore the most common Microsoft Teams performance use cases that our customers managed with our help. Our Microsoft Teams monitoring solution enables the IT to prioritize and resolve problems to optimize the performance of Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Office 365 and business applications delivered to the business lines and customers.

How to Ensure Microsoft Teams PSTN Connectivity and Monitor its Service Quality

Dependence on Microsoft Teams has never been greater, and the pressure is on for IT teams to deliver exceptional user experiences – anytime, anywhere. In this series of videos, we explore the most common Microsoft Teams performance use cases that our customers managed with our help. Our Microsoft Teams monitoring solution enables the IT to prioritize and resolve problems to optimize the performance of Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Office 365 and business applications delivered to the business lines and customers.

VXLAN vs VLAN: a Definitive Guide

With the widespread adoption of cloud technology, data centers play a huge role in running key applications and business processes for organizations around the world. In 2022, the IT spending on data centers is expected to be $227 billion, and $237 billion by 2023. To run these datacenters profitably and deliver quality service to their customers, organizations are constantly trying to squeeze out maximum performance from the hardware.

Avoid IT's Worst Nightmare by Monitoring Proactively - Not Reactively!

The day-to-day operations of a business rely on having a top-of-the-line network performance. Customers, employees, managers and business partners require fast access to applications, services and data. When bottlenecks or security breaches occur, identifying these threats immediately is an absolute must. Monitoring networks is necessary for IT departments, but doing so effectively is an even more significant challenge.

4 steps to bring network observability into your organization

The vast majority of corporate IT departments have a network monitoring solution. Typically that solution is built on standalone software platforms. If that’s you, this post is for you. You’re probably hearing a lot about “observability” these days. Generally, that’s the ability to answer any question and explore unknown or unexpected problems to deliver great digital experiences to your users.

Optimizing Microsoft Teams PSTN for the Hybrid Workforce

Martello Vantage DX™ enables IT teams to understand and share Microsoft Teams user experience metrics with every stakeholder involved in the service delivery. Gain insight into Microsoft Teams’ telephony user experience; whether the calls are direct or using PSTN connectivity such as Calling Plans, Direct Routing or Operator Connect.

Network Monitoring Safety Checklist-5 Steps to Take

Network monitoring is a vital part of your security architecture and layered security portfolio. Step one in your network monitoring safety checklist is making sure you have network monitoring in the first place. The rest of our steps assume you have network monitoring and lay out five ways to optimize its value.

The Great Resignation - What's at Stake for IT?

Roughly 47.4 million people quit their jobs and left the workforce last year in search of better ones, leading to what we now call the Great Resignation. Then, as the economy re-opened and companies intensified hiring efforts, millions of people switched careers, searching for better working conditions and higher salaries. Experts say the trend will continue as the Gen Z population reshapes the labor market.

How To Configure Flowmon and WhatsUp Gold

In the previous “Flowmon and WhatsUp Gold: Discover application experience issues through single pane of glass” blog post we have demonstrated how IT Infrastructure Monitoring (WhatsUp Gold) and Network Performance Monitoring & Diagnostics (Flowmon) work seamlessly together to report on application performance, user experience and infrastructure status.

Peering, edge computing, and community with Grant Kirkwood | Network AF Episode 16

Chief Technology Officer and Co-founder of Unitas Global, Grant Kirkwood, joins Network AF to discuss motivations for starting the company and where they're at currently. Avi and Grant talk about what it is like to be a service provider and a solution provider (MSP) in one, and how it plays into what Avi calls the APIfication of networks and IT strategy.

Introducing OID Monitor History

Despite everyone’s best efforts, network failures happen. And when downtime means lost productivity, fast troubleshooting becomes an integral part of IT operations. So with the addition of OID (object identifier) monitoring history, Auvik providing users an archive for troubleshooting, analysis, and planning. When it comes to managing network issues, diagnosing the root cause is the first step. And often, there’s a gap between when an incident occurs, and when it’s reported.

Measuring RPKI ROV adoption with NetFlow

Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) is a routing security framework that provides a mechanism for validating the correct originating autonomous system (AS) and prefix length of a BGP route. Route Origin Authorization (ROA) is a cryptographically signed object within the RPKI that asserts the correct originating AS and prefix length of a BGP route. For as long as the internet has existed, the challenge of securing its underlying protocols has persisted.

SolarWinds IT Management and Monitoring for Government

Each of our products are designed to solve the problems IT professionals face every day. With a continuously expanding portfolio that scales to meet your needs, SolarWinds is revolutionizing the way federal IT manages their operations with our simple, powerful, and secure IT management software. SolarWinds supports every branch of the DoD, nearly every civilian and intelligence agency in the United States, and a majority of National Health Trusts in England and European Union institutions.

How Network Monitoring Defuses Hacker Bombs

You know by now that hackers literally never sleep. Chances are your network has been hit before and absolutely will be hit again. Hackers invent new techniques every day and tweak existing ones, many of which are automated—which is why we can say that hackers literally never sleep. Hackers either attack your network directly or attack your infrastructure through your network. Either way, the network itself is your first line of defense.

Multi-Cloud Trends In The Banking And Finance Sector

Organisations in the banking, insurance, and financial services sectors have been slower than others in moving to the cloud due to concerns over security, data residency, and privacy. For more traditional financial institutions, there is also the not insignificant consideration that their core banking systems are running on decades old on-prem architecture that is just not possible to shift to the public cloud. Nevertheless, adoption of the cloud in banking and finance is happening.

The evolution of network visibility

In the old days, it took a bunch of help desk tickets for an engineer to realize there was something wrong with the network. At that time, troubleshooting meant logging into network devices one-by-one to pore over logs. In the late 80s, SNMP was introduced giving engineers a way to manage network devices remotely. It quickly became a way to also collect and manage information about devices. That was a big step forward, and it marked the beginning of network visibility as we know it today.

Advanced Traffic & Security Analysis in WhatsUp Gold with Progress Flowmon

It’s a simple fact that the more tools an IT team has to use, the less effective they are. That’s why one of the chief values of WhatsUp Gold is putting everything you need to find and fix network issues fast in one simple, easy-to-use application. With that in mind, we’ve simplified advanced network traffic analysis and security threat detection from Progress Flowmon by adding those dashboards to the WhatsUp Gold interface.

MYCOM OSI supports Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) for its suite of Service Assurance applications

MYCOM OSI announced today that it has implemented support for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) as the foundational service for its EAA (Experience Assurance and Analytics) suite of Service Assurance applications.

What is Microsoft's New Operator Connect Accelerator?

One of the great things about being in the telecom industry is the constant innovation that occurs. For example, Microsoft just announced an exciting new offering for telecom service providers, Operator Connect Accelerator, aimed at helping them get the most out of their Teams investments. Operator Connect is Microsoft’s managed service for connecting Teams and telephony services.

Filling in the Gaps: Manufacturing and MSPs

It’s no secret that the world of manufacturing is changing fast. The “fourth industrial revolution”, a.k.a. Industry 4.0, is leading to the digitization of just about every stage in the manufacturing process. Of course, a shift from a primarily analog and mechanical world to one where digital is at the forefront means increased bandwidth requirements, larger potential attack surfaces for cybersecurity exploits, and a drastic increase in the sheer amount of network-connected devices.

Importance of Networking Performance Monitoring Tools and How Infraon can Help

The importance of networking management is even more now because of increasing network complexity. Network management has become one of the most crucial aspects of a business. Without effective network management, it is impossible to have a productive workplace. It is also impossible to have zero downtime and network failures. Network management makes the high availability of networks a reality. Table of Contents.

Types of Network Performance Monitoring Tools

Modern networks are complex. Their complexity is increasing daily. As much as this complexity solves modern-day problems, it may also give rise to many. Adding to the complexity is that networks have become the backbone of an organization. With remote working increasing, organizations are relying on networking infrastructure and technologies.

Flowmon 12 - Workflows and UX Improvements

We released Flowmon 12 at the end of February. The new and updated functionality in the latest version has been well received by existing users, and has prompted many new organizations to consider the product. The headline changes in Flowmon 12 are in the blog post Progress Flowmon 12 – Ultimate Enabler of Your Multi-cloud Strategy.

Understanding data analysis and online activity with David Belson

Network AF host and Kentik CEO Avi Freedman discusses data analysis and trends in understanding online activity with David Belson. David is Cloudflare's Head of Data Insight, where he helps the organization communicate information about the internet such as outages and changes in protocol adoption.

Network Alerts-Monitoring and Notifications

When it comes to IT, you can’t do anything with an asset you can’t see. When it comes to your networking, monitoring offers the eyeballs to know what is going on. But IT and network pros don’t spend all day staring at a dashboard waiting for something to happen. Like your local police department, they rely on notifications of trouble. Instead of 911 calls, IT depends on network alerts.

Why Redundancy Should Be An Important Part Of Your Multi-Cloud Strategy

For many organisations, multi-cloud has become or is becoming inevitable. After all, it’s unlikely there is a single cloud out there that is able to support all your requirements. More than likely however, is the chance that your business is becoming multi-cloud by stealth. Organisations typically use several, to dozens, to hundreds of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) products, as well as a handful of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) hosting services, and development Platforms-as-a-Service (PaaS).

Working with Cloudflare to mitigate DDoS attacks

The rolling thunder of cybersecurity warnings has built to a crescendo this year. According to HelpNetSecurity, cybercriminals launched over 9.75 million DDoS attacks in 2022. The Cloudflare Attack Trends 2022 Q1 Report published yesterday shows an alarming increase in application-layer DDoS attacks. And our own Doug Madory has been sharing analysis on the impact of cyberattacks, too.

What's New with Flowmon ADS 12 and outlook ahead?

Flowmon ADS 12 is here and ready to alert you faster than traditional NDR tools that only rely on blacklist with known malicious domains. With its latest release, Flowmon ADS 12 brings detection of anomalous behavior on the network and allows users to easily tune the detection. And that’s not all! Flowmon ADS 12 also enables you to lower the count of false-positives and decreases the time required to investigate detected events.

Expert Series: Large MSP Was First to Upgrade to DX UIM 20.4

A NoSQL database provides a mechanism for data storage and retrieval, without using the tabular relations associated with relational databases. Originally referred to as "non-SQL" or "non-relational" databases, NoSQL databases are increasingly used in big data and real-time web application environments. NoSQL systems are also sometimes called “Not only SQL” to emphasize that they may support SQL-like query languages or sit alongside SQL databases in polyglot-persistent architectures.

NoSQL Database Monitoring with DX UIM

A NoSQL database provides a mechanism for data storage and retrieval, without using the tabular relations associated with relational databases. Originally referred to as "non-SQL" or "non-relational" databases, NoSQL databases are increasingly used in big data and real-time web application environments. NoSQL systems are also sometimes called “Not only SQL” to emphasize that they may support SQL-like query languages or sit alongside SQL databases in polyglot-persistent architectures.

What is remote network monitoring?

Remote network monitoring is a technical specialty that was born almost at the same time as networks themselves. Since then, many strategies have emerged when it comes to monitoring network elements. In this article we will talk about the current techniques based on SNMP polling and network statistic collection through Netflow, and we will also mention outdated systems such as RMON. Most techniques are purpose-oriented, so they are especially useful.

Network Nickels and Dimes: Government IT on a Budget

State and local governments have always had to get a little creative when it comes to efficiently managing the government IT budget—they have to ensure they can stretch those dollars as far as they’ll go. However, inefficient network management practices are only adding to the challenges of local government IT modernization, and sucking the life out of their information technology budget.

Bolster network monitoring with root cause analysis

If you own an enterprise, then you know the value of a healthy network and how seriously detrimental a network outage is to your business. But network issues are inevitable. The heavy dependence on networks to meet the ever-changing client and internal usage requirements takes a heavy toll on the network. This makes networks vulnerable to common problems such as unplanned, sudden downtime, high resource utilization, and hardware malfunctioning.

Welcome to the Auvik family, MetaGeek!

We have some exciting news. Today I’m thrilled to welcome a new member to the Auvik family. The MetaGeek team are experts in wireless and through their 15+ year history, MetaGeek has led the way in creating tools to help network administrators and wireless engineers build, monitor, and troubleshoot Wi-Fi networks. At Auvik, we have an ambitious and aggressive roadmap to deliver a remarkable technology management experience.

Modernizing Network Monitoring with InfluxDB and Telegraf

This article was originally published in The New Stack. As the technology landscape continues to change at a rapid pace, enterprise companies are in a rush to catch up and modernize their legacy IT and network infrastructure to capture the benefits of newly developed tools and best practices. By adopting modern DevOps techniques, they can reduce their operational costs, increase the reliability of their services and improve the overall speed and agility at which their IT teams are able to move.

Achieve End-to-End Network Visibility for SASE

Enterprise networks now extend out over the internet due to cloud migrations, SaaS applications and hybrid work approaches. To support this, organizations are adopting SASE solutions to extend their traditional secure web gateways into the cloud. Having complete network visibility from end-to-end across these distributed environments is critical in safeguarding user experience. AppNeta and DX NetOps from Broadcom Software help you achieve network visibility anywhere, assuring the security and performance users can rely on.

Network AF, Episode 13: Talking networking and PR with Ilissa Miller

In this episode of the Network AF podcast, Avi Freedman connects with Ilissa Miller, network whisperer and PR industry veteran. Ilissa and her team translate technology into business terms by helping clients understand the value and functionality of a company. Avi asks Ilissa how she got into the field, her biggest takeaways that helped launch her own business and what’s important in today’s networking world.

The Future of Monitoring: Turning Unknown Unknowns into Known Knowns

To ascertain risk, national security and intelligence professionals have long used concepts such as known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. The idea of unknown unknowns was created in 1955 by American psychologists Joseph Luft (1916–2014) and Harrington Ingham (1916–1995). This concept continues to be used today in risk assessments and is applicable to technology. The unknown unknowns are the threats and potential problems that remain invisible until their impact manifests.

How to Measure VoIP Quality & MOS Score (Mean Opinion Score)

VoIP Quality is highly reliant on network performance, which means that many network problems like packet loss, latency, and jitter can cause high levels of VoIP degradation. To avoid embarrassing choppy voice calls, or lagginess during your next client meeting, we’re running you through how to measure VoIP Quality with MOS Score (Mean Opinion Score).

A practical guide to container networking

An important part of any Kubernetes cluster is the underlying containers. Containers are the workloads that your business relies on, what your customers engage with, and what shapes your networking infrastructure. Long story short, containers are arguably the soul of any containerized environment. One of the most popular open-source container orchestration systems, Kubernetes, has a modular architecture.

Network Monitoring Handbook: Your Complete Guide to Network Monitoring and Management

This guide has been designed to document all the critical elements in designing and managing an efficient, effective and secure network. This handbook gives you complete insights into various aspects of network monitoring and the best practices involved in creating an effective and efficient network.

Why Build a Transport Network

Since the days of voice calls transmitted along the top wire of a cattle fence, telecom providers have been looking for new and better ways to transport their service offerings. Today there is a wide array of alternatives from optical to switched and routed, logical mesh, ring, and star architectures to choose from. How do you know which is right for you? What is the best mix of design, build and manage features to carry you into the future? Moreover, how do you keep your project cost-effective?

What's New with Flowmon 12?

Flowmon 12 is here and ready for hybrid/multi-cloud deployments! With its latest release, Flowmon 12 brings the support of native flow logs from Google Cloud, and Azure and improves support for AWS flow logs. And that’s not all! Flowmon 12 brings fully redesigned reporting for better readability, command line tool to assess quality of the flow data and improvements in workflow and user experience based on customer feedback.

Anatomy of an OTT traffic surge: 2022 Men's NCAA Basketball Championship

Last night, Kansas topped the University of North Carolina in a thrilling come-from-behind victory to win their fourth championship in men’s college basketball. It was also notable in how viewers saw the game. Instead of being aired on CBS (network television), the game was carried on TBS requiring viewers to have either a cable TV package or use a streaming service to watch the game. Here’s what we saw.

Data Sovereignty: Everything You Need to Know

“What’s data sovereignty? Is it the same thing as data privacy? What about data sovereignty vs data residency?” These are questions that plague many business owners, especially when you consider the cost of non-compliance. But achieving compliance can be challenging when you aren’t sure what rules you should be complying with.

How to Import/Export Orion Custom HTML Widgets

Advanced Orion Platform users are familiar with the power of the Custom HTML widget, but getting started can be difficult. Thankfully, you can download pre-existing widgets directly from THWACK to get you started. After you've crafted some of your own widgets, you can return the love and share yours with the community.
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How Network Vulnerabilities Can Impact Operational Resilience

Operational resilience remains the top priority for those in financial services. From the U.S. Federal Reserve's study into "Sound Practices to Strengthen Operational Resilience" and "Principles of Operational Resilience" from the Basel Committee to the Bank of England's upcoming rule changes for financial organizations in the UK, the intent is to create financial services institutions that are geared towards managing digital disruption. The goal is that financial service businesses can continue providing mission-critical services in the event of disruptions such as IT glitches, outages, and cyber-attacks.

Source-Side Queueing: You Down With UDP?

Source-side queueing is a fancy way of saying: You can configure Cribl products to make sure data isn’t lost in the event of downstream backpressure, again. Those familiar with Cribl Stream might be aware of destination queuing or persistent queuing, wherein Stream can write data to the local disk in the event of an issue reaching the destination. Maybe your SIEM is suffering from disk I/O latency. Maybe there is a DNS problem with your load balancer (Hint: It’s always DNS).

The Benefits Of A Data Centre Partnership With Console Connect

We know getting data centre interconnection right is vital whether you’re a global enterprise with operations in multiple markets around the world or a SaaS provider looking to roll out in new geographies. We also know data centres need help attracting and retaining customers. In this blog, our Global Data Centre Partner Manager Adam Gibson explores the benefits that Console Connect can bring to your data centre business.

[Live Webinar] Achieving Multi-Datacenter High Availability with HAProxy ALOHA and GSLB

HAProxy ALOHA is a load balancer that’s ideal for companies in search of high performance and ease of use. It comes as either a hardware appliance or a virtual appliance and provides load balancing of TCP, UDP and HTTP traffic, DDoS protection, and active-active clustering. One of its newest features is the ability to distribute traffic across multiple datacenters or regions through global server load balancing(GSLB).

April/2022 - CVE-2022-22965: Spring4Shell Remote Code Execution Mitigation

Recently, a Remote Code Execution vulnerability was discovered in the Java Spring Core library. This vulnerability allows attackers to execute arbitrary code on affected systems. You can find more information on that vulnerability in the announcement on the Spring Blog. While HAProxy Enterprise, HAProxy ALOHA, and other products within the HAProxy Technologies portfolio are not impacted by this (they do not use the Spring Core library at all), you can use our products to mitigate the attack.

The Realities of SD-WAN

According to research from IDC, SD-WAN (Software-Defined Wide Area Networking) is one of the fastest-growing segments of the network infrastructure market, poised to reach $5.25 Billion in 2023. Changing the way global networks are architected, SD-WAN enables increased visibility and control of applications across the network while delivering a better user experience and improved operational efficiencies.