In this article, we’ll be going over the 5 best Cisco Switch monitoring tools for 2023. We'll provide an overview of switches, monitoring, and how to choose the best tool for you.

Organizations are under constant attack, and it’s critical to reduce the time it takes to detect attacks to minimize their cost. This first article in our new security series dives deep into how Kentik helps customers before, during, and after a cyber attack.

In this article, we’ll take you on a quick tour of the new Lua event framework shipped with HAProxy 2.8—plus demonstrate how Lua helps you further customize HAProxy’s behavior. We’ll start with a brief, high-level overview of Lua and how HAProxy uses it. Next, we’ll introduce you to the Lua event framework, show you what you can do with it, and familiarize you with its mechanics.

In recent years, network operations teams have had to contend with several critical challenges, including: In response to these challenges, teams are increasingly turning to SD-WAN. The market for SD-WAN is massive, and continuing to grow, potentially reaching $47 billion by 2031. Through SD-WAN technologies, organizations are able to realize a number of benefits. However, these benefits aren’t a sure thing. In fact, many teams encounter challenges with their SD-WAN implementations.

How much network traffic is received by a business in the United States on average? More specifically, how many gigabytes do you think it is? The numbers may surprise you. According to Statista, the average traffic received was nearly 200 BILLION gigabytes (178.21 billion GB). And it is expected to grow to 224.08 in 2023. Another interesting statistic involving traffic, with numbers provided by Broadband Search, is that users in America generate 3.1 million GBs per minute every minute.

Kentik customers can now map traffic and performance of Microsoft Azure infrastructure with visibility into Azure Firewalls, Express Routes, Load Balancers, VWANs, and more in Kentik Cloud.

Fidelity National Information Services, Inc. (FIS) is an American multinational corporation which offers a wide range of financial products and services. FIS is most known for its development of Financial Technology, or FinTech. FIS has a portfolio of products for the financial services sector, including both retail and investment banking. FIS global customers connect to services from FIS’s Little Rock, AR datacenter.

One of the greatest challenges for an IT team is visibility. How can you prove the value of your IT team’s accomplishments when no one can see what – or how well – you’re doing? Progress WhatsUp Gold release 2023.0, available as of June 21, 2023, is set to change that. This release includes several exciting updates meant to provide better data access to all.

To track IP traffic flows and record metadata, IT professionals use network flow monitoring protocols and supporting solutions to collect and analyze data.

Twingate is a network access platform that enables customers to deploy a zero trust authentication layer with their infrastructure as code (IAC) provider of choice. Using this model, you can program strict access control rules that can be updated and co-deployed alongside changes to your infrastructure. Each time a user establishes or closes a connection to a resource, Twingate documents the event with details such as the port, the volume of data transferred, and user identification.

Network traffic monitoring has become critical in today's digital age, where businesses rely on various applications and services to operate. As the amount of data transmitted over networks continues to grow exponentially, network administrators must keep a close eye on the traffic to ensure optimal network performance and security. Network administrators must have a deep understanding of packet flows, collection methods, and analytics to ensure that their networks are secure and performing optimally.

Zero trust isn’t an approach that can be delivered by buying a single product that claims to provide it. Instead, it is an approach that needs to be understood and implemented in complementary ways across an organization’s IT systems. We recently hosted a webinar titled Applying Zero Trust to Data Centre Networks to provide guidance on how organizations can use zero trust to enhance the security of their IT systems. The webinar details are below, after a summary of the topics covered.

Reliable network connectivity is paramount for uninterrupted communication and efficient data transmission. The ping test is a valuable tool to assess network connectivity, identify potential issues, and troubleshoot them effectively. If you're seeking to troubleshoot network issues or test connectivity between hosts, this comprehensive guide offers step-by-step instructions and valuable insights for performing an effective ping command test.

NetFlow is a network protocol that enables devices to report key traffic flow data such as origin, direction, and overall volume.

IT admins are expected to keep the organization’s network reliable and resilient all while the complexity of today’s networks grows. From adopting hybrid infrastructures and maintaining multi-cloud environments’ security to managing ever-increasing bandwidth demands, enterprise network management is getting more difficult by day.

Cybersecurity remains a key concern for any organization. The cost of cybercrime is expected to rise to $8 trillion in 2023 and reach $10.5 trillion by 2025. Various cybersecurity solutions are available, with Firewall as a Service (FWaaS) emerging as one of the most valuable assets when it comes to protecting your interests. We will investigate FWaaS solutions, how they work, how they're different from traditional firewalls, and what benefits they can provide for a range of organizations.

The Network Operations Center (NOC)— the powerful, centralized epicenter that supervises, monitors, and maintains network availability—is the core of the network infrastructure. It’s up to the NOC to keep large, complex networks running reliably.

Today’s modern enterprise WAN is a mix of public internet, cloud provider networks, SD-WAN overlays, containers, and CASBs. This means that as we develop a network visibility strategy, we must go where no engineer has gone before to meet the needs of how applications are delivered today.

Let's start by simply stating that MPLS is arguably still the leading way to interconnect remote offices back to the company’s primary data centers. MPLS is also great for real-time traffic (like video conferencing). Yet even with those facts working in MPLS’s favor, its usage is dropping year after year. According to TeleGeography’s annual WAN Manager Survey, there was a 24% drop from 2019 to 2020 – and that trend hasn’t slowed down.

Streaming telemetry holds the promise of radically improving the reliability and performance of today’s complex network infrastructures, but it does come with caveats. In the first of a new series, Kentik CEO Avi Freedman covers streaming telemetry’s history and original development.

In this article, we will explore what Cisco NX OS is and what it is used for. You will find out what metrics are and why it is very important to monitor them. Then, we will look at how to monitor Cisco NX OS metrics with Grafana, a graphical data visualization tool, and how MetricFire can help us with this. In order to learn more about MetricFire, book a demo with our technical specialists or sign up for the MetricFire free trial today.

API monitoring is the process of keeping tabs on the performance of your REST APIs. Learn how Kentik’s API monitoring tools let you identify bottlenecks, spot performance drops, and maintain availability to ensure a quality experience for your end users. Learn more in this API monitoring tutorial.

Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) is the dominant IP addressing scheme in the modern web. By enabling network engineers to create subnets that encapsulate a set range of IP addresses, CIDR facilitates the flexible and efficient allocation of IPs in virtual private clouds (VPCs) and other networks.

Kubernetes has become the de-facto platform for containerized applications. But it’s a fractured environment and each Kubernetes distribution has their own nuances. Further, much of today’s cloud native software design assumes a healthy Internet connection, which is not always available. What’s missing is a standardized way to deliver applications on top of any Kubernetes, without an Internet connection (also known as air-gapped deployments).

Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) is a network architecture that provides organizations with a flexible, secure, and cost-effective way to manage their networks. SD-WAN technology abstracts the underlying network and provides an intelligent layer of abstraction, making it possible to manage network traffic and dynamically control the flow of data. SD-WAN technology is an attractive option for organizations looking to improve the performance and security of their networks.

The adoption of software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) technologies continues to pick up pace. By employing SD-WAN technologies, organizations have the potential to realize a range of advantages. Teams can achieve better performance while using lower cost, using commercially-available technologies. For example, teams can use public internet services rather than more expensive private WAN technologies, such as MPLS.

We are excited to share that the AIOps and Observability solution from Broadcom has earned a leader position for platform play and maturity in the GigaOm Radar Report for Cloud Observability, 2023. This report reviewed solutions from 20 vendors on 13 criteria, including across such areas as innovation, understanding of emerging trends, solution capabilities and features, and deployment models.

The answer to this question can be very complex, like today's networks. Many enterprise leaders think that this is a subject that should be left to the care of technology geniuses. However, the reality is that this should matter to everyone given the impact the network has on businesses today. The Internet is the new enterprise network. This is due to the fact that user experiences now rely more on ISP and cloud networks than they do on those that reside within the four walls of the data center.

Limited visibility into network performance across multi-clouds frustrates even the best teams. That’s why we’re thrilled to announce enhanced AWS and GCP support for Kentik Cloud, enabling network, cloud, and infrastructure teams to rapidly troubleshoot and understand multi-cloud traffic.

This model has benefits, but at the same time, it introduces complexity for the IT teams tasked with monitoring and securing IT systems. Existing network monitoring technologies that system admins use with on-premise infrastructure are typically not expandable to include infrastructure and services running on public cloud platforms. This is a problem as you cannot manage and secure what you cannot see.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the current buzz word in IT with AI promoted as the magic ingredient for improving business performance across a wide range of areas. But how, specifically, does AI enhance Network Management? The idea that computers can manage themselves is nothing new.

Stretching back to the AS7007 leak of 1997, this comprehensive blog post covers the most notable and significant BGP incidents in the history of the internet, from traffic-disrupting BGP leaks to crypto-stealing BGP hijacks.

Integrating network intelligence and application observability, our latest Customer Digital Experience Monitoring enhancement enables end-to-end visibility and eliminates silos.

HTTP/3 is the latest generation of the HTTP protocol, and its ability to serve applications over QUIC offers several advantages for user experience, including reduced latency, improved reliability, and faster page loading as a result of fixing the head-of-line blocking issue in previous versions of HTTP. Both HAProxy and HAProxy Enterprise offer support for using HTTP/3 over QUIC, although the steps for enabling QUIC in HAProxy and HAProxy Enterprise are different.

Office 365 is used by more than one million companies around the world. Business employees count on these apps constantly to do their jobs, whether they’re writing documents, updating spreadsheets, building slides, or checking email. While cloud-based apps like Office 365 offer undeniable advantages for enterprises and business users, they also create tough challenges for IT operations and network operations (NetOps) teams.

You have probably seen (or even been to) your company's data center. If not, chances are you have looked at photos of one from a major company like Facebook or Google. Why bring this up? Because when some folks think about the word 'database,' images of rows upon rows of servers holding data come to mind. Others think of the cloud, with zettabytes of data stored in rows, columns and tables.

SDN and NFV are acronyms you hear frequently in discussions of modern networking. In fact, they appear so commonly that they can be easy to confuse or conflate with one another. But that would be a mistake. SDN and NFV are related terms, but they are also distinct. You can use SDN without using NFV, and the benefits of NFV are not the same as the benefits of SDN in general. Keep reading for a breakdown of what SDN and NFV have to do with each other, and what to use when.

Cloud network reliability has become a catch-all for four related concerns: availability, resiliency, durability, and security. In this post, we’ll discuss why NetOps plays an integral role in delivering on the promise of reliability.

Implementing a Cognitive Network Operations Center (Cognitive NOC) comes with its fair share of challenges, but businesses must be able to rely on technology to operate and grow, making network performance, reliability, and security top priorities.