The year might be ending, but the Kentik news never stops. We’re back with our bite-sized roundup of everything you might have missed at Kentik in December 2023.

DX Unified Infrastructure Management (DX UIM) is a powerful solution that enables IT operations teams to monitor and manage the performance and availability of their IT infrastructure and applications. One of the key core components of DX UIM is the Discovery Server probe. This probe collects, processes, and stores information about devices and applications. In this blog, we will explore some of the benefits and use cases for Discovery Server.

On November 7, 2023, the AIOps and Observability team announced general availability of DX Operational Intelligence 23.3 and DX APM 23.3 for on-premises deployments. While the announcements and Release Notes cover all the important enhancements, several new capabilities deserve additional attention—especially those for installing and upgrading the DX Platform. These enhancements offer the following benefits: Below, you’ll see seven enhancement areas involving installation and upgrades.

Monitoring your instance of NGINX gives you insight into your webserver's requests and connections. These insights can help in identifying performance bottlenecks, optimizing configurations, and ensuring efficient load handling. Monitoring all layers of your technology infrastructure allows for the early detection of potential problems such as server overload, disk space shortages, or network issues.

In this post, Doug Madory reviews the highlights of his wide-ranging internet analysis from the past year, which included covering the state of BGP (both routing leaks and progress in RPKI), submarine cables (both cuts and another historic activation), major outages, and how geopolitics has shaped the internet in 2023.

Every day, organizations face external threats as a consequence of exposing their services over the internet. An estimated 2,200+ attacks occur in a 24-hour period—or one attack every 39 seconds. Add the fact that an average data breach (one of many potential consequences of poor security) costs companies $4.45 million, and the need for strong security is impossible to ignore. Web application and API security is key to protecting your infrastructure, data, and users.

Networks are the lifeblood of organizations. They facilitate data flow, applications, and services while keeping operations running smoothly. However, there’s a critical challenge that often goes unnoticed – network visibility gaps. Progress WhatsUp Gold release 2023.1, available as of December 19, 2023, is set to change that. This release includes several exciting updates meant to close gaps in Network Visibility.

Modern networking relies on the public internet, which heavily uses flow-based load balancing to optimize network traffic. However, the most common network tracing tool known to engineers, traceroute, can’t accurately map load-balanced topologies. Paris traceroute was developed to solve the problem of inferring a load-balanced topology, especially over the public internet, and help engineers troubleshoot network activity over complex networks we don’t own or manage.

Securing privileged accounts is of utmost concern to cybersecurity professionals, and Active Directory, Microsoft’s identity and access management service, forms the backbone of the majority of organizations. Active Directory (AD) centralizes user accounts, computers, and resources, ensuring access control, and local administrator accounts wield substantial power within Windows systems.

Poised to redefine the landscape of digital communication stands the groundbreaking achievement that is IPv6, the sixth generation of the Internet Protocol. The evolution from IPv4 to IPv6 marks a pivotal shift in internet technology, driven by the increasing scarcity of IPv4 addresses and the expanding scale of the global network.

In the early 1990s, as the digital world stood on the cusp of an explosive expansion, the foundational structure of the internet faced a critical challenge: the classful IP addressing system was buckling under its own rigidity and inefficiency. Locked into fixed classes (A, B, and C), this system squandered valuable IP space, leaving the burgeoning network gasping for air as it grappled with rapidly depleting IP addresses.

A VPN, or Virtual Private Network, enables secure communications over an untrusted network. It enables users to connect to servers and networks from virtually anywhere, creating a secure tunnel between the user and a remote network or server. VPNs ensure data privacy and prevent unauthorized access, ensuring the data transmitted remains confidential and protected from external threats.

Managing incoming web traffic for your applications is essential to ensuring optimal performance, preventing abuse, and maintaining the security of your cloud infrastructure. To accomplish this, one of the tools HAProxy Enterprise users have at their disposal is rate limiting—the practice of preventing clients from making too many requests and using system resources unfairly.

Despite the siren song of AI in the keynotes, visitors were far more focused on solving real-world problems. These are the issues that have plagued IT practitioners for years, if not decades: troubleshooting and validating performance and availability of their applications, services, and infrastructure.

As per a survey by Comcast Business, around 85% of IT leaders trust AI networking tools for meeting their organization’s goals. This stat alone is enough to show how big of a role AI is playing in network monitoring. And it’s just the beginning, with rapid development in Artificial Intelligence, we might see a lot more sophisticated AI use cases for network monitoring. But how exactly does AI help in network monitoring? What its roles, benefits, challenges, and how to implement it?

Inspired by our own conversations with you at AWS re:Invent 2023, here’s what we think should be on your radar for 2024.

In the intricate landscape of contemporary network management, comprehensive and insightful tools have never been more critical. One tool that stalwartly deciphers the complexities of network traffic is NetFlow. Developed by Cisco Systems, NetFlow is a robust protocol that serves as a cornerstone for understanding, monitoring, and optimizing the flow of data within a network.

Continuing from my previous blog on the series, What you can’t do with Kubernetes network policies (unless you use Calico), this post will be focusing on use case number five — Default policies which are applied to all namespaces or pods.

Kentik now provides network insight into Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) workloads, allowing customers to map, query, and visualize OCI, hybrid, and multi-cloud traffic and performance.

We are pleased to announce that several Broadcom software products are now available on the Google Cloud Marketplace, providing Google Cloud customers with market leading value stream management and network performance monitoring capabilities via a simplified procurement process and consolidated billing with their Google Cloud account.

Monitoring your network performance is important for many reasons and can help in detecting network issues such as bandwidth congestion, latency, packet loss, or hardware failures. By continuously monitoring your network, you can identify areas where improvements can be made, allowing for optimization of resources, better allocation of bandwidth, and overall enhancement of network efficiency.

Learn how to analyze subscriber behavior using Kentik. In this post, we focus on the challenges and solutions of identifying and tracking the customers in an IP network while complying with regulations such as GDPR, show how Kentik Custom Dimensions and Data Explorer provide the analysis, and finally touch on how the associated APIs help automate and ease the entire process.

In today's digital-first landscape, maintaining the health and performance of your network is critical for the seamless operation of your business and its services. To that end, network observability has emerged as a key concept and discipline in ensuring the robustness and performance of networks. But what is network observability?

Are you relying on outdated manual methods to monitor your network? Struggling to keep up with the increasing complexity of your IT infrastructure? Being constantly reactive to network problems instead of proactive in preventing them? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then you’re putting your business at risk. But don’t worry, there’s a way out — Remote Network Monitoring.

A deep dive into networking reveals a plethora of protocols and methodologies. One such protocol that stands out is the Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM), a switching technique designed to unify telecommunication and computer networks.

Kubernetes is an excellent solution for building a flexible and scalable infrastructure to run dynamic workloads. However, as our cluster expands, we might face the inevitable situation of scaling and managing multiple clusters concurrently. This notion can introduce a lot of complexity for our day-to-day workload maintenance and adds difficulty to keep all our policies and services up to date in all environments.

In the dynamic world of IT, traditional network monitoring approaches are no longer sufficient to manage the complexities of today’s networks—be they wired or wireless. To stay ahead of network events, IT administrators must shift from being reactive to adopting a proactive stance. This transition involves a comprehensive approach to network monitoring that includes forecasting future network requirements with the help of machine learning (ML) technology.

Get a dedicated internet solution with all the benefits of Megaport’s scalable network fabric in just 60 seconds.

HAProxy 2.9 further extends HAProxy's performance, flexibility, and observability. This release came together through the efforts of all the community members who got involved. A release like this requires feature requests, bug reports, forum discussions, code submissions, QA tests, and documentation! In other words, this project is fueled by people like you! If you're interested in joining this vibrant community, it can be found on GitHub, Slack, Discourse, and the HAProxy mailing list.

Network outages have become a dreaded reality, disrupting businesses, personal lives, and communication channels. While no network is immune to this unfortunate event, the recent Australian telecom outage serves as a stark reminder of the impact such disruptions can have. The outage, which lasted for several hours, caused nationwide disruptions to Australian businesses, essential services, and daily life.

Hyperscalers are driving the shape of new metro optical networks – literally. AWS, Microsoft and Google have reshaped data center to data center connectivity over the years and now, as they populate their data centers with telecoms equipment, they are deploying it in higher density, with a better power utilization than telcos get. This is because they are not depth constrained so can go up to 600 millimeters deep unlike the standard telco 300mm hard limitation.

Whether you’re an in-house IT professional or a managed service provider, ensuring the security and integrity of your networks is a crucial part of your bailiwick. In pursuit of greater security, Network Access Control (NAC) serves as a formidable guardian, ready to protect digital assets by regulating who gains entry to a network. Understanding the fundamental concepts and best practices of NAC is essential for any organization that values data security and network integrity.