Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

February 2023

How does Cloudify Manage the Lifecycle of VNFs and Network Services in ETSI MANO

In 2021, Cloudify introduced the Agile-First approach to 5G network orchestration, creating a bridge between the Telco and DevOps worlds. In those previous POCs, Cloudify proved to be a platform built to support agile service delivery and multiple interfaces that allow multi-vendor flexible solution integration. Today, Cloudify takes the next step to provide a vendor-agnostic solution in 5G and the public cloud.

Exploring Your Network Data With Kentik Data Explorer

A cornerstone of network observability is the ability to ask any question of your network. That means having an unbound capacity to explore the tremendous amount and variety of network telemetry you collect. It means seeing trends and patterns from a macro level, but it also means getting very granular to pursue any line of analysis of your data. Collecting information from flow records, SNMP, streaming telemetry, BGP, eBPF, and so on is indeed very important.

Learn about CWDM vs DWDM

Meeting bandwidth capacity needs of customers is a crucial business objective for today’s providers. While both coarse wavelength-division multiplexing (CWDM) and dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) are modern forms of wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) that effectively solve those increasing bandwidth needs by upgrading the utilization of new and existing fiber, they are each designed to tackle different network challenges.

The 2023 Network IT Management Report Part 3: Extending Your Reach

This is the third in a four-part series focusing on the findings from our 2023 annual Field Report for IT Management. 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 three, we’ll discuss how organizations are thinking about extending the reach of their visibility and control over their networks with Wi-Fi and SaaS management.

The Ultimate Guide to SNMP

Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is a basic network protocol designed to collect and report data from network devices connected to IP networks — even if the devices are different hardware and run different software. Most modems, routers, switches, servers, workstations, and printers will support SNMP communication. SNMP messages are transported via UDP on port 161.

What is Network Performance Monitoring: The Gandalf of Networks

In today's digital age, network performance monitoring has become a crucial aspect of IT infrastructure management. The ability to monitor and manage network performance is essential for ensuring that networks run efficiently and effectively. Just as Gandalf served as a wise and trusted advisor to the Fellowship of the Ring in J.R.R.

18 Best Practices for Cloud Automation

Everyone is shifting their workloads to the cloud, but one challenge remains: Workloads need to be automated. Whether they’re employing a cloud-native, cloud server, or hybrid model—IT operations teams need to know what, when, and now also where to automate. Speaking at the recent 2022 Automation Virtual Summit, Dave Kellermanns, Global Advisor for Automation, Broadcom Software explored some lessons learned and best practices for cloud automation. Read on to see some of the highlights.

OpenTelemetry Nginx Tutorial - Instrument and visualize traces

OpenTelemetry is an open-source standard for instrumenting cloud-native applications for generating different types of telemetry data. A robust observability framework set up using OpenTelemetry can help tremendously while troubleshooting software in production. Nginx is one of the most widely adopted web servers. Most often, nginx is used as a reverse proxy. It serves the frontend or backend applications behind the reverse proxy.

SolarWinds named supplier on the Crown Commercial Service's G-Cloud 13 framework to provide secure cloud services

G-Cloud 13 serves as an online catalogue where public sector customers can buy cloud-based computing services, and with SolarWinds as a named supplier, it's never been easier to support public sector organisations with its services.

The Russification of Ukrainian IP Registration

Last summer we teamed up with the New York Times to analyze the re-routing of internet service to Kherson, a region in southern Ukraine that was, at the time, under Russian occupation. In my accompanying blog post, I described how that development mirrored what took place following Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.

How to Troubleshoot Packet Loss

If you're experiencing network issues, such as slow Internet speeds, poor audio or video quality, or dropped connections, packet loss could be the culprit. Packet loss is a common network issue that affects networks of all sizes, and its impact on users and businesses can be very frustrating if it’s not dealt with quickly. So we’re teaching you how to identify and troubleshoot packet loss, and causes of packet loss, in your network!

Monitor User Behavior to Detect Insider Threats

The risk from insider threats has grown massively, with perpetrators frequently getting around organizations' increasingly complex perimeter protections. It is one of the most common ways customer data or industrial and trade secrets leak. This very complex topic includes many types of threats and techniques. Let's discuss how you could detect insider threat activity at a network level.

Catchpoint Explainer Video

Catchpoint is the Internet Resilience Company™. The top online retailers, Global2000, CDNs, cloud service providers, and xSPs in the world rely on Catchpoint to increase their resilience by catching any issues in the Internet Stack before they impact their business. Catchpoint’s Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM) suite offers synthetics, RUM, performance optimization, high fidelity data and flexible visualizations with advanced analytics.

Best Practices for Monitoring Your Wi-Fi Network

The bulk of networked devices are now wireless. Most Wi-Fi manufacturers now offer some form of Wi-Fi monitoring, including cloud-based solutions, and often have great dashboards that require no setup at all. But if you don’t know it’s there, or how to take advantage of it, is it really any help? This quick guide is designed to help your team with best practices when it comes to Wi-Fi monitoring: how to understand and make the most of what is available to you.

Implementing a Cost-aware Cloud Networking Infrastructure

Cloud networking is the IT infrastructure necessary to host or interact with applications and services in public or private clouds, typically via the internet. It’s an umbrella term for the devices and strategies that connect all variations of on-premise, edge, and cloud-based services.

What Is Packet Loss: The Invisible Enemy of Network Performance

Network Metrics No matter the size or scope of your business, network connectivity and performance are essential for any business’ operations. From video conferencing and VoIP, to cloud-based applications and remote work, businesses rely heavily on the network to stay connected and productive. However, network performance can be severely impacted by packet loss, one of the most common issues that IT professionals face.

Monitoring Loadmaster Performance with Flowmon NPMD

The Loadmaster Network Telemetry feature makes it easier than ever to get key insights on your applications into your Flowmon deployment. By creating both cluster-wide and application specific channels you can quickly build NPM dashboards and topologies that surface essential performance and availability metrics broken down by application, client and server.

How to Improve SD-WAN Visibility for Businesses

There’s a lot of talk about SD-WAN technology in the networking world, and so many businesses are making the switch to SD-WAN with promises of higher, more reliable performance. But, when they do, so many companies lack SD-WAN networks visibility to identify performance issues, and see if their SD-WAN service is actually performing as promised. Keep reading to learn how to get the SD-WAN visibility your company actually needs.

Symantec Edge SWG (formerly ProxySG) Performance Monitoring: Gain Full Observability with DX NetOps and AppNeta

For teams running secure web gateways (SWGs), also referred to as proxies, in today’s complex, dynamic network environments, extensive observability is a must have. Symantec offers a range of flexible deployment options for its SWGs, offering support for cloud, edge, and hybrid approaches. This blog explores a Broadcom solution that provides comprehensive observability for the Symantec edge offering, Symantec Edge SWG (formerly ProxySG).

The Consolidation of Networking Tasks in Engineering

In recent years, the rapid development of cloud-based networking, network abstractions such as SD-WAN, and controller-based campus networking has meant that basic, day-to-day network operations have become easier for non-network engineers. The result we’re starting to see today is a sort of consolidation of networking tasks, leading to a need for only a small number of highly skilled network engineers to handle the less frequent heavy lifting of advanced design and troubleshooting.

A Bright Future for Rural Utilities

It’s a bright future for broadband, especially in the American Heartland. Vastly improved technology, service demand growth, and unprecedented public investment have created a perfect storm of opportunity in our industry. At the same time, there are challenges we must face to ensure that our communication and service offerings are cost-effective, reliable, and secure. Will you be ready?

Learn about Operator Connect vs Direct Routing

As hybrid and remote work continues to become the norm for businesses of all sizes, organizations are increasingly gravitating to cloud-based unified communication tools to boost internal collaboration and stay connected to customers. Microsoft Teams is already one of the most popular choices for chat and meetings and it is becoming a popular tool to use as a cloud-based business phone system.

Best Wi-Fi Analyzer Tools - Free and Paid Versions

Every organization today relies on Wi-Fi for its business-critical functions, from small businesses with a dozen employees to international enterprises with locations across the globe. When your wireless network performance is slow and spotty, it can be more than frustrating — poor connectivity can bring your operations to a grinding halt. Using the right Wi-Fi analysis tools, you can analyze, monitor, and secure your wireless network – regardless of your size.

DX UIM 20.4 CU6: What's New and Why You Should Upgrade Now

For DX Unified Infrastructure Management (DX UIM) customers, upgrading to the latest release has significant benefits – and that’s especially true with the latest version, release 20.4 cumulative update 6 (DX UIM 20.4 CU6). It offers a significant number of enhancements and new capabilities. DX UIM 20.4 CU6 provides teams with several advantages, including enhanced accessibility, improved operational efficiency, and richer insights.

How to Monitor MPLS Networks

If you manage an enterprise network, then you’ve definitely come across MPLS. Although many businesses rely on MPLS technology for large, high performing networks, they can suffer from network problems, like network congestion, that can impact user experience. Monitoring MPLS using a Network Monitoring tool is key to identifying and solving network issues that impact MPLS performance.

Internet in Numbers 2022

“The Internet (or Internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a network of networks that consists of private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope, linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless, and optical networking technologies.

4 Azure Load Balancer Metrics to Monitor

An Azure Load Balancer is a Layer-4 (TCP, UDP) load balancer that provides high availability by distributing incoming traffic among healthy VMs. A load balancer health probe monitors a given port on each VM and only distributes traffic to an operational VM. Azure Load Balancers are frequently used in Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) deployments. From our work with Azure Load Balancer, we think there are 4 key metrics and events you should proactively monitor and alert on.

Why Should You Care about SaaS Discovery and Management?

Overall, 59.77% of these customers said “All 3 of These Areas” are on the radar! Software as a Service (SaaS) has become a staple in the modern workplace. With the new last mile of the office network, businesses have had to adapt to a hybrid work-from-home model, making SaaS apps more critical than ever. In fact, Gartner predicts that the SaaS industry as a whole will see 16.8% growth in 2023.

Ten Automations to Make Your Network Agile and Efficient

Even in the most structured environments with clear operational strategies, complexity build-up in infrastructure and operations is unavoidable as businesses grow. To help these environments thrive in a consistent, reliable way, it’s vital to optimize the IT function: the backbone that supports every business application and ensures service excellence across all other functions. Automating operations is the only way for IT to scale and support today’s business demands.

What's new with AWS in 2023

Despite being the oldest and largest cloud vendor, market leader Amazon Web Services, known to all as AWS, is not immune to market trends. Despite a 20% year-on-year increase in fourth quarter revenue on 2022, growth was considerably slower than the preceding quarters, as companies of all sizes in all sectors reel in their tech spend.

What is Secure Access Service Edge (SASE)?

Check Point’s 2022 Workforce Security Report states that more than half of the workforce works remotely in 57% of organizations. The increase in the number of employees that work from home brings up new security implications that on-premise IT environments didn’t have to worry about. As organizations continue to undergo digital transformation, the existing network and network security architectures no longer meet the needs of the current digital era.

How to Use Time-Stamped Data to Reduce Network Downtime

Telecommunication organizations need to ensure they have the necessary resources and technology to maintain service uptime SLAs. Increased regulations and emerging technologies forced telecommunications companies to evolve quickly in recent years. These organizations’ engineers and site reliability engineering (SRE) teams must use technology to improve performance, reliability and service uptime.

DX NetOps Flow Management: Modernized Deployment and Visualization

On any given day, network administrators have to contend with significant challenges. They often struggle with key questions: How do I ensure I’m spotting traffic anomalies? How do I use our resources most efficiently? How can I intelligently plan for network capacity upgrades? By employing network flow monitoring, administrators can gain accurate insights into these topics.

Agent vs. Agentless Monitoring

Network monitoring is a critical aspect of managing and maintaining the performance and security of a network. It includes monitoring and analyzing network traffic, devices, and systems to identify potential issues and ensure that the network operates efficiently and effectively. Network monitoring can help organizations identify and prevent security breaches, identify and troubleshoot performance issues, and ensure compliance with industry regulations and standards.

Gathering, Understanding, and Using Traffic Telemetry for Network Observability

Traffic telemetry is the data collected from network devices and used for analysis. With traffic telemetry, engineers can gain real-time visibility into traffic patterns, correlate events, and make predictions of future traffic patterns. As a critical input to a network observability platform, this data can help monitor and optimize network performance, troubleshoot issues, and detect security threats. However, traffic telemetry can be difficult to understand.

What is HAProxy, and what is it used for?

In December 2022, the latest version of HAProxy, 2.7.0, was released. This open-source software is both a proxy and a load balancer, and is immensely popular due to the sheer volume of features it provides to help reduce or even avoid downtime and manage web traffic. Website or application downtime is disastrous for businesses. You want to serve as many users as possible, but if you have nothing in place to manage traffic, then your web applications can quickly become overwhelmed and fail.

Data Gravity in Cloud Networks: Achieving Escape Velocity

In an ideal world, organizations can establish a single, citadel-like data center that accumulates data and hosts their applications and all associated services, all while enjoying a customer base that is also geographically close. As this data grows in mass and gravity, it’s okay because all the new services, applications, and customers will continue to be just as close to the data. This is the “have your cake and eat it too” scenario for a scaling business’s IT.

The 2023 Network IT Management Report Part 2: Confidence and Automation

This is the second in a four-part series focusing on the findings from our 2023 annual Field Report for IT Management. 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 two, we’ll discuss the confidence IT pros have in their networks and how they can use automation to do more with less. You can read the full 2023 field report and compare your own IT statistics here.

Drive Down Your Network Complexity With Advanced Automation

Service providers are spending billions of dollars a year dealing with network outages, service degradation and growing security threats. The increase in network traffic is a key factor resulting in these challenges. Consequently, automation is considered critical to enabling service providers to address operations and management issues resulting from this traffic increase. The traditional rules-based approach to implementing automation will not be sufficient to support the level of activity needed to control, manage and secure the network.

Exploring Your Network Data with Kentik

In this short video overview, Kentik’s Phil Gervasi explains how the Kentik Data Explorer lets network engineers (including network systems, cloud security and SREs) ask any question about their networks and explore the tremendous amount and variety of network telemetry being collected. Phil talks about the various types of network telemetry you can explore, the many dimensions of that data that can be filtered and analyzed, and gives a quick tour of the Data Explorer interface.

5G Real-time Analytics: The Last Mile of Automation

5G promises to unlock a broad set of new services across consumer, enterprise, and industrial domains at lower costs and higher velocity. It will accomplish this by adopting cloud-native, fully automated networks with end-to-end traffic engineering. Cloud native functions, DevOps, and slicing enable 5G networks to scale-in/out, support many use cases, and billions of devices, to deliver on the promise. Unfortunately, as network functions, devices, and SLAs explode, the challenge of operational troubleshooting also increases, by orders of magnitude.

Digging Into the Recent Azure Outage

In the early hours of Wednesday, January 25, Microsoft’s public cloud suffered a major outage that disrupted their cloud-based services and popular applications such as Sharepoint, Teams, and Office 365. Microsoft has since blamed the outage on a flawed router command which took down a significant portion of the cloud’s connectivity beginning at 07:09 UTC.

Protect Data from Ransomware with Flowmon & Superna

With the rapid rise of ransomware in the recent years, protecting your data is now crucial than ever. Combination of Flowmon' Anomaly Detection System (Flowmon ADS) to provide early warning about upcoming attacks and Superna's capability of taking proactive snapshot of data is a powerful combo to protect your data before any exfiltration attempt.

Network Observability: A Side-By-Side Comparison of WhatsUp Gold NTA & Flowmon

Imagine starting your car in the morning and having your attention captured by a little red check engine light. After expressing frustration in your own unique way, your next objective is to determine why this little light has brought darkness to your morning. Your owner's manual clearly outlines how to operate and routinely maintain your vehicle, but all you know about this little light is that you’ll soon be meeting your local mechanic.

Best Practices for Enriching Network Telemetry to Support Network Observability

Network observability is critical. You need the ability to answer any question about your network—across clouds, on-prem, edge locations, and user devices—quickly and easily. But network observability is not always easy. To be successful, you need to collect network telemetry, and that telemetry needs to be extensive and diverse. And once you have that raw telemetry data, you need to interpret it.

What Causes Packet Loss: Reasons Why Your Data is Going MIA

Packet loss is a common problem in computer networks that can have a significant impact on network performance and business productivity. When data packets are lost through the network, the data they contain needs to be retransmitted, which can slow down data transfer rates and cause interruptions in real-time applications like video conferencing and voice calls.