Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

January 2023

The 2023 Network IT Management Report Part 1: Network Management Needs

This is the first in a four-part series focusing on the findings from our 2023 Network IT Management Report. We surveyed 4500 IT professionals from internal IT teams and MSPs across North America to gauge where their organizations are heading from a network management perspective. In part one, we’ll detail the overarching needs network professions across all industries to have in common. You can read the full 2023 report and compare your own IT statistics here.

Kubernetes network monitoring: What is it, and why do you need it?

In this article, we will dive into Kubernetes network monitoring and metrics, examining these concepts in detail and exploring how metrics in an application can be transformed into tangible, human-readable reports. The article will also include a step-by-step tutorial on how to enable Calico’s integration with Prometheus, a free and open-source CNCF project created for monitoring the cloud.

Outages Happen. Now What?

Network outages happen more often than you think. We may not experience them directly or even know they're occurring at all. When outages affect household names like Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and others, however, we're sure to find out after the fact that there was an issue. Depending on the user's activities and the duration of the issue, stress and frustration levels can vary. When a marketer can’t get that ground-breaking advertisement up on Facebook, they can get antsy.

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What are Network Operation Centers (NOC) and how do NOC teams work?

Modern-day markets are highly competitive and in order to foster stronger customer relations, we see businesses striving hard to be always available and operational. Hence, businesses invest heavily to ensure higher uptime and to have dedicated teams that constantly monitor the performance of an organization's IT resources. In this blog, we will explore what NOC teams are and why they are important.

How to Perform Packet Loss Tests to Prevent Network Issues

As businesses continue to rely heavily on network connectivity to stay connected and productive, network performance has become an essential component for successful operations. However, one of the most common issues that IT professionals face is packet loss, which can significantly impact network performance.

Network and Infrastructure Monitoring - Is Every Tool the Same?

Every organization reaches a certain size where network and infrastructure monitoring becomes a necessity. And while that “certain size” will depend on whether you’re running a private company, non-profit organization or government agency, the time to act always comes. Network and Infrastructure Monitoring tools enable organizations to harness greater benefits from their computing infrastructures. How you use these tools can even give you a competitive advantage.

Infovista unveils NLA Cloud Platform to unify cloud-native network planning, testing and automated assurance and operations

Extends proven cloud platform to scale and integrate telco-specific data, automation and analytics across operators' network lifecycle to reduce CSPs' network operating costs and time-to-market of new services.

The True Cost of Switching to Auvik

Tolly’s 2022 Network Visibility Capabilities Report demonstrated how Auvik delivers industry-leading time to value. The report takes a deep dive into how Auvik stacks up to the competition across a variety of criteria. Which is all well and good from a purely analytical standpoint, but what does it mean for your day-to-day? After all, we’re IT pros, not accountants.

Five eye-catching Grafana visualizations used by Energy Sciences Network to monitor network data

ESnet (Energy Sciences Network) is a high-performance network backbone built to support scientific research. Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and part of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, ESnet provides fast, reliable connections between national laboratories, supercomputing facilities, and scientific instruments around the globe. Our mission is to allow scientists to collaborate and perform research without worrying about distance or location.

Easily analyze AWS VPC Flow Logs with Elastic Observability

Elastic Observability provides a full-stack observability solution, by supporting metrics, traces, and logs for applications and infrastructure. In a previous blog, I showed you how to monitor your AWS infrastructure running a three-tier application. Specifically we reviewed metrics ingest and analysis on Elastic Observability for EC2, VPC, ELB, and RDS.

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Uptime monitoring: How to track your network availability, 24/7

When it come to measuring an organization's ability to support end users and provide services, network uptime can be a great yardstick. An inability to ensure optimum uptime can negatively impact your business delivery, resulting in financial and reputational losses. If you're doing it manually, ensuring 24/7 network uptime is a challenging exercise requiring considerable resources. It is way more convenient to have a monitoring mechanism in place that can monitor network uptime and notify the network admin proactively about any bottlenecks that might lead to network downtime.

Understanding Cloud Costs In 2023

During times of economic uncertainty, some companies become extra sensitive to costs, while others look to optimise their spend as they seek out competitive advantage during the downturn. Adopting public cloud services and infrastructure purely as a means of saving costs has long been debunked as a false economy, with many of the savings realised in the form of agility, efficiency, and optimisation, which may at some point turn into revenue gains.

Modernizing LinkedIn's Traffic Stack | Sanjay Singh & Sri Ram Bathina

Presented by Sanjay Singh & Sri Ram Bathina (LinkedIn) at HAProxyConf 2022. In this talk, you will learn about LinkedIn's experiments with HAProxy in the past, their current HAProxy use cases, and the plan for replacing the existing stack with HAProxy. You will also see LinkedIn's evaluation process, why HAProxy came out as a winner, and how they are planning to leverage HAProxy’s features to modernize their traffic stack which will make them better prepared for the future.
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Network Fault Management and Monitoring: Definition, Benefits, and Guide

Can companies afford to have network breakdowns or downtime in this digital-first era? No, they can't. With digital transformation taking place across industries and increasing expectations to stay connected wherever you are, companies need to up their game and ensure they provide uninterrupted network services and high performance. Therefore, understanding network fault management and monitoring - what they are, and the benefits of using a fault management system can help you manage your network more effectively.

A DWDM Guide: Definition, Benefits, and When You Should Use It

Today’s telecom, cable, and data providers constantly compete to provide the best, most reliable service to customers, while investing in the right technologies to maintain the integrity of data and enable the separation of users. Because of this, service providers often spend countless hours searching for cost-effective, yet future-proof solutions that fit their business needs. This is where DWDM comes in.

What Millions of Requests per Second Mean in Terms of Cost & Energy Savings | Willy Tarreau

Presented by Willy Tarreau (HAProxy) at HAProxyConf 2022. Discover the power of HAProxy in this must-watch talk by Willy Tarreau, the developer of the original HAProxy project. Learn how HAProxy has set new world records in performance and scalability and discover how its cutting-edge technology can help you save on costs and energy consumption. With climate change at the forefront of our minds, it's more important than ever to find ways to conserve energy in every aspect of our lives. Join Willy as he explores real-life examples of energy-efficient load balancing.

How Much Does That Minute Cost?

Network outages are both common and expensive – usually far more expensive than people realize. Yes, the network is down and the organization is losing money, but do you really appreciate how much money? And how much an outage can actually cost on a per minute basis? It’s not only more than most people think, it’s something that can be mitigated fairly easily.

SASE: A Long-term Play for Security

Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) is a strong trend emerging in enterprise network security, representing the long-term capability to integrate and consolidate a variety of networking and cybersecurity tools. Let’s do a quick dive on the technology to understand why it’s necessary. SASE emerged as an outgrowth of the software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN) technology movement, which made it easier to configure, orchestrate, and manage WAN connectivity from enterprise branches.

What is a Network Protocol and How Does it Work?

It is impossible to allow communication between computer systems, servers, routers, switches, and other network-enabled devices without following a set of protocols. Without protocols, devices would be unable to understand the electronic signals sent between them via network connections. Every day, billions of individuals utilize network protocols, whether they are aware of it or not. Each time you connect to the internet or make a phone call, you are using network protocols.

Understanding the Advantages of Flow Sampling: Maximizing Efficiency without Breaking the Bank

The whole point of our beloved networks is to deliver applications and services to real people sitting at computers. So, as network engineers, monitoring the performance and efficiency of our networks is a crucial part of our job. Flow data, in particular, is a powerful tool that provides valuable insights into what’s happening in our networks for ongoing monitoring and troubleshooting poor-performing applications.

Held for Ransom - Ransomware Detection & Response with Flowmon ADS

Flowmon Anomaly Detection System takes an AI-based approach to detecting and alerting on the presence of threat actors within your network from the point of initial access all the way through to exploitation. Gaining visibility into a Ransomware attack by mapping a threat actors earliest movements within your network enables you to stop the attack in its infancy. Flowmon's forensic visibility has you covered with all of the evidence you will need to conduct your investigation following an attack attempt.

How To Optimise Your Cloud Infrastructure In 2023

With costs rising across the board, business leaders are seeking to become more savvy about their tech expenditure. It’s now well recognised that without proper oversight, cloud costs can easily spiral out of control, but reducing spend isn’t always easy. Understanding when and where to make changes to your infrastructure is what is key to maximising productivity and ROI from cloud infrastructure investments.

Progress Flowmon Ranked as a Technology Leader in SPARK Matrix 2022 NDR Report

The threat landscape that organizations faced in 2022 and continue to face in 2023 is large, complex, and continuously changing. Defense requires a multi-layered approach that delivers monitoring, detection, and response at many points within on-premise and cloud-based infrastructure and systems. A Network Detection and Response (NDR) solution is critical to a modern cybersecurity defense strategy.

Cuba and the Geopolitics of Submarine Cables

This week marks a decade since the ALBA-1 submarine cable began carrying traffic between Cuba and the global internet. On 20 January 2013, I published the first evidence of this historic subsea cable activation which enabled Cuba to finally break its dependence on geostationary satellite service for the country’s international connectivity. ALBA-1 was one of my first lessons on how geopolitics can shape the physical internet.

What's in Store for NetOps in 2023?

There are many factors making networking both more complicated and more critical than ever. The advent of cloud infrastructure, web-based applications, and increasingly diverse network environments demand a new approach to network operations, or NetOps, as it’s referred to in the industry. Networks are bigger than ever: they now connect everything ranging from automobiles to cloud servers.

Catchpoint Announces the World's First Complete Solution to Monitor and Protect the Internet's Leading Companies from BGP Incidents in Seconds

Catchpoint's Internet Performance Monitoring Platform helps IT teams identify and mitigate BGP incidents, including hijack attempts and routing issues, with the industry's broadest network of vantage points in the world drawing on real-time BGP monitoring.

The "New Last Mile" of the Office Network

The office network has been in a near-constant state of evolution since dumb terminals and token rings. MPLS unlocked the ability to connect LANs. VPNs allowed end-users to work remotely while still being behind the firewall. Wi-Fi made intra-office travel easy and lessened reliance on extensive cabling. The WAN is slowly giving way to SD-WAN. New software and cloud-based networking componentry are allowing vendors to reimagine firewalls and routing.

Announcing HAProxy Data Plane API 2.7

HAProxy Technologies is proud to unveil the 2.7 release of HAProxy Data Plane API. This release was a huge undertaking, and as with the 2.6 release, we focused on extending support for configuration keywords. We are happy to announce that with this release we support all HAProxy configuration keywords in the Data Plane API. Along with enhanced keyword coverage, we’ve added the ability to specify multiple named defaults sections through the API.

100 Funny Wifi Names For Your Home, Office, or Hotspot

The best thing about moving into a new home is getting to call it your own. But the second-best thing is coming up with a funny wifi name you can tell your friends about. As people say, “home is where the wifi connects automatically!” And you certainly shouldn't leave its name up to chance. While setting up your internet is one of the first things you do after moving, simply connecting to a random scramble of characters does not feel very personal, does it?

Kubernetes and the Service Mesh Era

Kubernetes is a game-changer for enterprise organizations. Automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications allows organizations to embrace a cloud-native paradigm at scale and more easily employ best practices, such as microservices and DevSecOps. But as with all tech, Kubernetes has its limits. Kelsey Hightower famously tweeted that “Kubernetes is a platform for building platforms. It’s a better place to start; not the endgame.”

Network Security for Banks-Preventing Breaches, Protecting Data

It is no surprise that cybercriminals are after the money, and banks have plenty lying around. They also have gobs of data, making banks irresistible to hackers who have a field day attacking complex banking IT systems flush with more connections than a movie agent. Here are a few recent facts to know.

The Reality of Machine Learning in Network Observability

For the last few years, the entire networking industry has focused on analytics and mining more and more information out of the network. This makes sense because of all the changes in networking over the last decade. Changes like network overlays, public cloud, applications delivered as a service, and containers mean we need to pay attention to much more diverse information out there.

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How to Mitigate Network Risks to Achieve Highly Resilient Business Services

They say change is good. But in IT operations, change is also the number one cause of outages. According to the Uptime Institute, 49% of all service outages are attributed to configuration and change management errors. That's a lot of avoidable headaches. And because errors often have downstream effects, it may not be obvious what caused an outage, resulting in prolonged downtime that affects revenue-generating business services, results in service level agreement (SLA) penalties, and causes a loss of customer trust. And those costs add up quickly. Gartner figures the meter for an average downtime event runs at $5,600 per minute.

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What's Using Your Bandwidth? Here's a Monitoring Tool

Bandwidth monitoring provides IT administrators with the assurance that the network has sufficient capacity to run business-critical applications. In addition, network ops team have end-to-end visibility to identify network hogs that cause the congestion. Typically, when a single component overloads in any network, it can bring the entire operation to its knees and impact the employee digital experience. For example, even if you may have a dedicated service plan from your ISP, employees will end up complaining about issues like large file transfer time and slower applications.

Business Benefits of Network Detection and Response (NDR)

When we talk about the business value of a tool or a system that at first glance may seem like a “nice to have” or a “helpful but not absolutely necessary” technology, it is a good idea to start any discussion on the merits of the tool by putting some things into perspective.