Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Load balancers play an important role in distributed computing. With load balancers, you can distribute heavy work loads across multiple resources, which allows you to scale horizontally. Since they are placed prior to computing resources, they need to endure heavy traffic and allocate it to the right resources fast. For this to happen, monitoring the health and performance of load balancers is key. In monitoring, visualization helps users to view various metrics quickly.

In monitoring, a target system or device is a deciding factor in designing your monitoring stack. You will have to consider various aspects starting from how you want to collect data in what frequency to how you want to surface metrics to end users. You will have to take this strategic approach when you want to monitor your network infrastructure. In this article, we will discuss how Grafana, an open-source visualization tool, can help you to monitor network switches.

Network monitoring is the practice of making sure the network as a whole, functions optimally by keeping a watch over all endpoints of a network, which is the heart of any business’s routine functioning. Any discrepancy in the form of a breach or slowdown could prove costly. Proactively monitoring networks helps administrators identify and prevent any potential issues that could occur at any time.

As complexity of systems and applications continue to evolve and change, the number of metrics that need to be monitored grows in parallel. Whether you’re on a DevOps team, an SRE, or a developer building the code yourself, many of these components may be fragmented across your infrastructure, making it increasingly difficult to identify the root cause when experiencing downtime or abnormal behavior.

IPv4 and IPv6 are the two versions of IP. IPv4 was first released in 1983 and is currently widely used as an IP address for a variety of systems. It aids in the identification of systems in a network through the use of an address. The 32-bit address, which may store multiple addresses, is employed. Despite this, it is the most widely used internet protocol, controlling the vast bulk of internet traffic. IPv6 was created in 1994 and is referred to as the "next generation" protocol.

HAProxy is one of the world’s most innovative and highest-performing load balancing solutions. The load balancer is critical for enabling high availability and supporting the dynamic scaling of infrastructure within modern applications. Because of its importance, engineers need tools that can quickly and effectively diagnose any problems with the load balancer if they arise.

It has been a while since I have been excited to write about encrypted tunnels. It might be the sheer pain of troubleshooting old technologies, or countless hours of falling down the rabbit hole of a project’s source code, that always motivated me to pursue a better alternative (without much luck). However, I believe luck is finally on my side.

There’s something that humans and machines have in common, and no, it’s not the disappointment suffered by the final season of Game of Thrones, or, well, at least not only that. What we have in common is that we need protection. You know, animals need it too, and plants, but if you’ve gotten this far, it seems that you’re interested in computers, networks and all these pretty modern “geek” things, so today we’ll talk about that kind of protection.

The meanings behind job titles can be an elusive thing in that they might only make sense to the people actually in the roles. Take networking jobs. It’s pretty common for people to think some titles can be used interchangeably, and that depending on where you work, a job may have a different name. In some cases, even IT professionals believe that the network specialist vs engineer are jobs are really the same responsibilities.