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Networks

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

The 2019 State of Corporate Connectivity

From legacy internet service to 5G possibilities, Spiceworks examines the evolution of telecommunications in the workplace. The internet has been a transformative force around the globe, both at home and in the workplace. Organizations rely on internet service providers (ISPs) to provide vital access to email, the World Wide Web, and cloud services that connect us. As communications and commerce increasingly take place online, there’s no question internet access is crucial to business success.

Network traffic analysis: from packet analysis to flow analysis

Monitoring has always relied on both network administration and network traffic analysis. Both fields provide ways to obtain data that allows us to obtain information about the general state of the platform. It is easy to understand that when faced with, for example, an application performance problem, we want to be able to observe and evaluate the traffic generated, and this is just what network traffic analysis does.

Brace Yourself-768K Day Is Coming

All over the internet, there are ominous rumblings that “768K Day” is on its way—and it’s likely going to happen before May is over. And while some ISPs think this BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) milestone is being overhyped like Y2K and Cisco assures us the sky isn’t falling, that doesn’t mean we’ll all be left unscathed. If you’re an MSP who hasn’t heard about 768K Day yet, brace yourself—you could be in for a serious connectivity headache.

Network Performance Monitor (NPM) Licensing

SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor, also called NPM, is a comprehensive network monitoring tool that displays real-time and historical health, availability, and performance statistics from SNMP-, API-, or WMI-enabled devices, such as routers, switches, firewalls, and servers. NPM is licensed based on the largest number of monitored elements - nodes, interfaces, or volumes - so you can choose the license size that best fits your environment and monitoring needs.

Context is Key: Additive vs. Subtractive Topology

Understanding the context of an IT incident can greatly reduce the MTTR and enhance the ability to determine the root cause. In an IT environment, ‘context’ is used to refer to the subset of information necessary to troubleshoot and diagnose an incident, or event. For some scenarios, the context may be the downstream dependencies after a high availability pair of firewalls goes offline, and in others, it may be the datastore in contention from multiple VMs.

To VPC or not to VPC? Pros and Cons in AWS Lambda

When you’re working with EC2 or containers, VPCs have long been viewed as a must-have. Without them, you will face a constant barrage of attacks aimed at your infrastructure and OS, such as brute force login attacks. But are VPCs still needed when it comes to AWS Lambda? What do you actually get when you put a function inside a VPC? And what are the downsides?

Understanding Istio Ingress

Istio is a hot technology right now. Giants such as Google and IBM have devoted entire teams of engineers to the project to push it to production readiness. Since 1.0 has been released recently, I wanted to write down some of the things that confused me coming from a strictly Kubernetes only world where we have Ingress controllers and Service load balancers and how Istio takes these same concepts but on stimulants.