Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

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.

This article was born of necessity. Chatting with my editors at Auvik, I went looking to see what kinds of advice other sites had on SysAdmin tools you should have handy to do your job. Two things immediately struck me: Now don’t get me wrong, software is important to have. But what if you can’t access that device to use the software? What if there’s a (gasp!) physical issue that needs to be addressed, and you have to get some hands-on time with some racks?

As an IT pro, you’re probably used to doing the heavy lifting when it comes to network security. You might even find your team responsible for educating the rest of your company on best practices when it comes to network common security hacks and how to prevent them. Today, we’re here to lighten that load a little.

As an MSP owner or manager, you want your teams to be continually improving and increasing efficiency. To make that happen, you know you need to be tracking MSP KPIs—after all, what gets measured gets improved. But which numbers do you track, how many do you track, and how do you actually use them to get better?

Aches in your back and neck? Clutter eating up your desktop and desk’s top? Feeling so absorbed in your to-do list that you forget to breathe? You could be suffering from IT job stress. And you’re not alone! Let’s look at ways to identify stress before it gets to be too much, and some helpful tips for letting it go.

It’s surprisingly difficult to find information related to monitoring a distributed network. I think this is because, in part, network pros take the term for granted. We all intuitively know what a distributed network is, and the term is pretty common in conversation. But when you start to think about a precise definition, or even search for one online, things get fuzzy. What exactly makes a network distributed? Is a distributed network fundamentally different from a decentralized network?

When I hear QUIC, my immediate reaction is, “The QUICk brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” That sentence has been ingrained in me since my first typing classes decades ago! I doubt the creators of QUIC were going for this type of reaction when they put together the name… but the good news is that this isn’t an article on typing. We’re diving into what the QUIC protocol is, how it works and how it’s used, and how it’s going to impact web traffic in the future.

One of the largest challenges with network bandwidth metering is the way traffic flows. Traffic comes in bursts. It’s never a constant, predictable stream of data you can measure once, spec hardware for and be done with (wouldn’t that be nice?!). Instead, you need to account for the dynamic nature of bandwidth utilization and its impact on performance. You’ll never be able to predict every burst of traffic your network experiences.

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.

Though I’m a big believer in the importance of network configuration management , even I’ll admit that network switch configuration from a command-line interface (CLI) is still one of the most fundamental network engineering skills you can have. It’s also one of the harder things to pick up if you’re new to the field. And it’s not just knowing what commands to enter. It isn’t always obvious what should be part of a basic configuration.