Download your complimentary copy of the 2022 GigaOm Radar Report For Network Observability here. As the 2022 GigaOm Radar Report for Network Observability states, "Network observability is a category of platforms and tools that go beyond device-centric network monitoring to provide truly relevant, end-to-end visibility and intelligence for all the traffic in your network, whether on-premises, in the cloud, or anywhere else.".

DX NetOps 22.2 continues to deliver our industry-leading visibility, scale and modern network coverage...now beyond the network edge to quickly and easily isolate end-user experience impact of managed or unmanaged network changes.

When running a business, the most crucial aspect for any entrepreneur or organization is to provide an exceptional customer experience (CX) and grow the business efficiently. Not only designing the best product or services but also a lot of things that an organization needs to take care of for delivering quality CX. In today’s digital world, customer retention is as necessary as customer acquisition, and organizations are working towards this path.

To contend with their escalating, intensifying demands, today’s operations teams must constantly be on the quest to boost efficiency. In my prior post, I offered a high-level introduction to DX Unified Infrastructure Management (DX UIM) Monitoring Configuration Service (MCS), outlining how its key features can significantly streamline administration in large-scale enterprise environments. In this follow up post, I’ll provide more details for teams looking to start working with MCS.

In a previous blog post, we dove into the wayback machine and looked at Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) Traps – a technology that allows devices (including network devices) to send alerts when specific thresholds have been reached. In this post, we are going to be a bit more forward looking and discuss some technologies that will, in theory, replace SNMP. It is important to keep in mind that the demise of SNMP has been predicted for years (actually decades).

We all know that cloud and SaaS adoption continues to grow rapidly, often outpacing budgets. In fact, spending on IaaS and SaaS exceeded budgets in more than 40% of organizations in 2021. As a result, network traffic is now spending much more time on the internet than in our own data centers. The internet has become the new enterprise network.

When considering application source code, the way you maintain consistency throughout environments is mostly straightforward. You write application code, commit it to source control, and then build, test and deploy via a CI/CD pipeline. Since the application is defined by the source code living in source control, the build will be identical in all environments to which it’s deployed. But what about the infrastructure on which an application runs?

For just about any organization, there’s a balance that has to be struck between absolute security and absolute convenience. Seemingly, every new innovation that increases convenience also introduces new risks. On the other hand, every safeguard instituted can also create complexity, delays, or in some other way diminish the user experience. Either way, businesses are exposed, whether to the catastrophic consequences of breaches, or of an erosion of user productivity and customer retention.

Cilium is a Container Network Interface (CNI) for securing and load-balancing network traffic in your Kubernetes environment. As a CNI provider, Cilium extends the orchestrator’s existing network capabilities by giving teams more control over how they build their applications and monitor traffic. For example, vanilla Kubernetes installations typically rely on traditional firewalls and Linux-based network utilities like iptables to filter pod-to-pod traffic by an IP address or port.

In Part 1, we looked at some key metrics for monitoring the health and performance of your Cilium-managed Kubernetes clusters and network. In this post, we’ll look at how Hubble enables you to visualize network traffic via a CLI and user interface. But first, we’ll briefly look at Hubble’s underlying infrastructure and how it provides visibility into your environment.

With HAProxy situated in front of their servers, many people leverage it as a frontline component for enabling extra security and observability for their networks. HAProxy provides a way to monitor the number of TCP connections, the rate of HTTP requests, the number of application errors and the like, which you can use to detect anomalous behavior, enforce rate limits, and catch application-related problems early.

With the latest release of our network monitoring and digital experience monitoring software, we are proud to introduce an industry-first Experience-Driven NetOps solution, taking network visibility to the new enterprise network, expanding beyond the network edge to ISP and cloud providers. The DX NetOps 22.2 release will enable teams to operationalize the new enterprise network, focus on user experience, and avoid chasing utilization spikes.

One of the easiest transport layer protocols available in the TCP/IP protocol suite is the User Datagram Protocol (UDP). The communication mechanism involved is minimal. With UDP, neither the receiver nor the sender receives any acknowledgements of packets received. This protocol's shortcoming makes it unreliable and easier to process than many other protocols. Although UDP is considered an unreliable transport protocol, it uses IP services to ensure the best attempts are made to deliver data.

An IP (Internet Protocol) address is a numerical label which is used for addressing he location and identification of the network interface for the devices connected to the computer network. The most used and popular IP version is IPv4 which uses 32-bit for IP addresses. Since the IPv4 became popular and the IPv4 addresses are getting depleted, Ipv6 is now used which uses 128-bit for the IP addresses.

For today’s IT operations teams, the stakes keep getting higher and demands only intensify. The services these teams are responsible for managing play an increasingly critical role in the prospects of the business, which means optimizing service levels is an absolute imperative. Meanwhile, the environments in play only seem to keep getting larger, more complex, and more dynamic. Given these factors, monitoring is a task that keeps getting more vital and more difficult.

IT Infrastructure Monitoring (ITIM) tools like Progress’s own What’s Up Gold are the backbone of any IT Operations monitoring strategy. However, these tools are primarily focused on general purpose visibility across a wide range of infrastructure and systems with an emphasis on operational availability and performance.

In HAProxy Data Plane API version 2.6, we continued the effort of expanding support for HAProxy configuration keywords, as this has been the priority with this release cycle, and it will be in the next one too to meet our goal of achieving complete feature parity with both the HAProxy configuration and Runtime API. This will enable you to use HAProxy Data Plane API for configuring HAProxy without any gaps in functionality.

Recently we caught up with the Sumo Logic team to discuss network visibility and optimizing application stack views. We took a look at their API and found that it would be easiest to use the HTTP Ingest method to send in our metric data.

Beginning at 8:44 UTC (4:44am EDT) on July 8, 2022, Canadian telecommunications giant Rogers Communications suffered a catastrophic outage taking down nearly all services for its 11 million customers in what is arguably the largest internet outage in Canadian history. Internet services began to return after 15 hours of downtime and were still being restored throughout the following day.

Communications are evolving at a dizzying pace, challenging service providers of all stripes to adopt the latest technologies and reshape their businesses for the new world. Telco Cloud, an area my team and I are deeply focused on, is one of the key components in making that transformation a success.

Many think they know what network bandwidth is but conflate performance with capacity. This blog, among other things, will end that confusion. And for true IT experts, we’ll dive deep into the whys and wherefores of network bandwidth monitoring and optimization.

Kentik Synthetics is all about proactively testing and monitoring specific elements of your network, the services it relies on, and the applications it delivers. That means using artificial traffic instead of end-user traffic to test a variety of aspects of digital experience monitoring like device availability, DNS activity, web application page load times, and BGP activity. But to test an end-user’s experience interacting with a website, we need to approach things differently.

Network performance monitoring (NPM) and application performance monitoring (APM) are both key pillars of an overall performance and reliability management strategy, especially when dealing with complex, distributed infrastructure across cloud-native environments. NPM and APM also complement each other, in the sense that NPM can serve as an additional source of truth and observability for application performance.

NOC (Network Operations Center) is responsible for monitoring and managing the entire IT infrastructure 24/7. It manages servers, routers, firewalls, VPN gateways, switches and any devices used by an organization. The staff working at a NOC alerts the IT staff when it observes anything untoward or out of place with all this equipment. They perform routine maintenance tasks like updating software patches, rebooting systems and installing new firmware.

VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) aren’t new. They’ve been around for almost three decades and are used by practically every organization and individual who pays attention to data privacy. But the kind of benefit every user derives from a VPN may differ. While some may use it simply to protect their confidential data when browsing the internet, others may use it to escape data throttling. After all, a VPN can help you break the bandwidth barriers your ISP imposes on you.

The Transmission Control Protocol provides reliable, ordered and, sometimes, time-sensitive data flow between applications across a network. As well as economizes network use by attempting to improve error-handling capability and providing reliable data transmission. The Transmission Control Protocol is the underlying communication protocol for a wide variety of applications, including web servers and websites, email applications, FTP and peer-to-peer apps.

This post is part of a series featuring customers, partners, and experienced DX Unified Infrastructure Management (DX UIM) practitioners. We’ve asked these expert users to share their knowledge with the broader DX UIM community. Today, we’re featuring Kathy Solomon, the Unix Systems Administrator for the R&D Support organization within Broadcom IT.