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The latest News and Information on IT Networks and related technologies.

What Is sFlow? A Guide to Sampled Flow Monitoring

What do you do when the switch carrying most of your traffic is the one device that cannot tell you what is on it? On high-speed core and data centre links, full flow export pushes device CPU past a comfortable line, so the export gets switched off and the busiest segment quietly becomes the least visible one. sFlow was built for that exact situation.

Building a Fiber Optic Testing Workflow: Inspection, Loss Testing, and Troubleshooting

A fiber link can look perfectly intact and still misbehave the moment traffic hits it. The gap between a cable that appears fine and one that actually performs comes down to how it was checked before handover. This article walks through a practical sequence for confirming that a link is ready for service, covering what to verify beforehand, how to prepare connections, which measurements matter, and how to turn the results into a decision.

How to Monitor Internet Uptime

Your ISP tells you your connection is up 99.9% of the time. Your users tell you the MS Teams video calls keep freezing. Both can be true at once, and that gap is exactly why you need to monitor Internet uptime yourself instead of taking your provider's word for it. This article covers what Internet uptime actually means, how to calculate it, what a good internet uptime SLA looks like, and how to monitor internet uptime with your own data so you're not stuck relying on your ISP's version of events.

Are AI Coding Agents the New CI Bottleneck?

AI coding agents are moving the software bottleneck from writing code to validating it. Here’s what that means for CI infrastructure, capacity planning, and software quality. This topic is explored in more detail in “CI Can’t Keep Up With AI,” an episode of Uplink, where Aditya “JP” Jayaprakash, Co-founder and CEO of Blacksmith, discusses how AI coding agents are reshaping CI and software delivery. Table of Contents.

BGP monitoring: Fixing the blind spot in your digital experience monitoring stack

Without Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) monitoring, your digital experience monitoring (DEM) stack can't detect the route hijacks, leaks, or instability that prevent users from reaching your applications. Most DEM stacks miss this entirely, and that gap is where some of the most damaging, hardest-to-diagnose outages happen.

What Is Coherent Optics?

Coherent optics is an advanced optical transmission technology that uses the modulation of light amplitude and phase, combined with digital signal processing, to transmit massive amounts of data over existing fiber optic cables, dramatically increasing network capacity by maximizing spectral efficiency without requiring new physical fiber deployments. Next-generation transport networks face a constant challenge: scaling capacity to keep up with relentless data growth.

How to Secure Cisco AnyConnect, Fortinet, and Palo Alto VPNs with RADIUS MFA

VPN is the first thing attackers test when they're trying to get inside a network. Not because VPN is technically weak - it's not - but because it's the front door, it's usually internet-facing, and in most organizations it asks for exactly one thing: a username and a password.

Selecting the Best Enterprise Session Border Controller

A Session Border Controller (SBC) is the gatekeeper for modern real-time communications. It's not just a network device. It is a core component of your security, interoperability, and service quality strategy. An SBC secures the boundary between your enterprise network and the outside world, protecting against threats, enabling connectivity between disparate systems, and managing traffic to deliver a high-quality user experience. Think of it as a firewall optimized for voice communications.