Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

In a perfect world, understanding how to manage a network would be a breeze. On your first day of managing a network, you’d find tons of documentation on the IT infrastructure waiting for you. Login credentials would be securely recorded and ready for review. Sadly, we don’t live in a perfect world. That’s why managing a new network can be tough—especially if you’re joining a brand new IT team or taking on a new client and aren’t sure what’s been done before.

When something goes wrong in your network, you often don’t find out about it until your users are affected, and you’re left scrambling to identify the issue and understand its root cause. The faster you find out about a network issue and why it’s happening, the quicker you can implement the right fix and spare your network users from unnecessary downtime.

What is network automation software? It’s something we’re going to be seeing a lot of in the near future. Networks worldwide continue to grow at astonishing rates to supply organizations with the access and bandwidth they need to operate. But in a survey by Oracle, 76% of respondents said network complexity was one of management’s biggest challenges. As network growth increases—and complexity along with it—we’ll need efficient and scalable ways to handle it.

Sustainable technology has become a hot topic in the tech world over the past few years. From the escalating environmental impact of heat and water-intensive activities like crypto mining and chip production to carbon taxes to sustainability becoming a pillar in the AWS Well-Architected Framework, there’s plenty of issues to talk about, but conversations become marked quieter when you shift to discussing solutions.

As a managed service provider, your success depends largely on the satisfaction of your customers. If they’re happy, they’ll stay with you and recommend you to others. But if they’re not, they’ll take their business elsewhere. Sometimes, some customers are never satisfied no matter how hard you try. Instead, they’re always finding something to complain about, which can be frustrating.

The idea of a VLAN, or Virtual Local Area Network, is simple enough, right? It’s hard to imagine any work in a modern networking/IT space without having encountered, set up, or managed a VLAN. Well if that’s all you needed to know about VLANs, we’d be done here, but there’s a bit more to it. To cover our bases: In most modern networks the primary purpose of the LAN is to provide connectivity to a wider network, most notably the internet.

At some point in your IT career, you’re going to be involved in a project. Whether you’re planning it or executing it, a project needs to be guided to ensure it achieves its goal. It’s easy to start, but without IT project management, deadlines can slip, costs can skyrocket, and things might never move forward. We’re here to help! We’ve enlisted the help of two of our Auvik experts that specialize in IT project management to pass along some of their hard-won tips and tricks.

For many companies, the beginning of October is also the beginning of the fourth and final quarter of the fiscal year. In IT, it’s a time to prepare for the new year by defining our priorities and setting our budget. COVID-19 threw a wrench into all of our 2020 plans last year and a lot has changed since then. But one thing that hasn’t changed is the need for a network monitoring system in your software stack.

You’ve heard the term IT help desk. You’ve probably also heard of IT service desks. They’re pretty much the same thing, aren’t they? They sound similar enough, so when people start throwing around mentions of help desk vs service desk, you don’t raise an eyebrow. After all, you don’t want to seem like you don’t know what you’re talking about. Here’s the thing: an IT help desk differs from an IT service desk.

Agent-based and agentless monitoring are the two main approaches network monitoring tools use to capture and report data from network devices. As the names suggest, the difference between the two is pretty simple: someone has to install extra software(the agent) for agent-based monitoring to work. But, that doesn’t explain why an IT team or an MSP would choose agent-based or agentless monitoring.