Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Administrators are tasked with configuring interfaces on network devices more than any other single thing. This makes sense—interfaces are the main points of connectivity, sending and receiving traffic throughout an organization. Configuring interfaces can be deceptively easy. Switchports might require a VLAN assignment, and often function with no other configuration at all. Router interfaces can be up and running with only an IP address.

Automation. It’s a common term. Some may call it a buzzword, even. When it comes to building a network, it’s usually not your first consideration. After all, what’s most important is getting users and devices online—and keeping them there. Isn’t automating the network an advanced step? Are we even capable of making network monitoring and management automatic?

At the end of November 2021, Auvik released our annual Network Vendor Diversity Report, and the data we collected had some interesting findings. Over 520,000 devices across 40,000 networks contributed, showing which vendors are taking a leading share of the market. In this roundup, we’ll show you some of the most interesting learnings we saw in 2021.

Connectivity is more important than ever to support our education system. BYOD, remote classes, Wi-Fi, and a variety of digital learning solutions are now just part of the equation. Education IT teams have a big task: making sure educational service delivery remains uninterrupted while balancing the constraints of limited budgets, staff, and time to support digital transformation that can keep up with modern demands.

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is a popular quote for a simple reason: Changes can lead to unexpected results. Many network engineers have learned this lesson the hard way. Stories of admins who update firmware or configurations only to have network problems begin are common. Even big names in networking have been hit by change-induced network failures.

State and local governments (SLG), the frontline for delivery of services much of the population rely on, face some difficult challenges when it comes to modernization of their IT networks. Among them, the tools and services being used are built on some seriously old legacy infrastructure.

It’s no surprise that monitoring and managing networks in the financial services industry is a complex task with plenty of challenges. In addition to the “standard” networking requirements, like high availability and traffic capacity planning, IT in the finance industry has to deal with regulatory and industry-specific challenges that create even more issues to deal with.

Smart devices are everywhere nowadays, from refrigerators and coffee makers to security cameras and thermostats. A significant percentage of these Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices are designed for consumers. However, they have also become a mainstay in various other fields, including healthcare, where their use has become prolific. The Internet-of-Medical-Things (IoMT) market has exploded in value, forecasted to reach approximately $158.1 billion by 2022, according to Deloitte.

When the internet was first developed, the IP addressing scheme was IPv4. This addressing scheme worked really well for about 25 years. After all, it had about 4 billion host addresses. But as the internet grew, we started to see that this was just not going to be enough. Now we have an entire infrastructure that was built on IPv4. While IPv5 addresses have been exhausted, we’ve used band-aid solutions to keep the internet growing.

The financial sector is in a constant state of change, and institutions must continually adjust to the evolving needs of their customers and the global marketplace. And with availability requirements like the ones European Banking Authority (EBA) provide—99.5%—financial institutions are driven to remain on the bleeding edge of responsiveness and convenience. Banking outages lead to lost consumer confidence and damaged reputations in a sector where trust is the cornerstone of doing business.