Chronically understaffed and constantly stressed-out IT Ops and NOC teams are overwhelmed by today’s IT noise. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) can help these teams because ML (and AI) are exceptionally good at processing enormous volumes of very complex data in real-time, or near real-time, and surfacing actionable insights. But ML successes in IT Ops are still hit-or-miss.

When network hardware vendors issue device recalls, field notices, or security alerts, the implication can be massive for MSPs. Take the 2017 clock signal issue, for example. That huge recall of Intel microchips was a large-scale vulnerability for tons of devices—and meant MSPs had to figure out which devices were affected on which client sites.

Network TAP (Terminal Access Point or Test Access Point) is the most common hardware device used for network traffic capture purpose. A Network TAP is basically a hardware designed to access the traffic between two network nodes and mirror it into a monitor port where we can connect a third party Analysis tool to listen.

First, let me say that I know AWS doesn’t promise anything about network performance as it relates to packets. At best, they leave it as a multivariate calculus problem for the reader — inclusive of CPU performance, code optimization, MTU, and current network congestion under the VLANs. But still, I was curious to see if there was any correlation to Amazon’s published “Network Performance” and the actual packets per second metric I tested.

Just like the goblins, ghouls, and ghosts that’ll be walking down your street tomorrow night, network management can be scary. If you’re not a network expert (and don’t have one on your payroll), it can be intimidating to make changes to clients’ infrastructure for fear of taking the network down. Small actions can have a big impact.

Rapidly increasing IT complexity, customer expectations around application availability and performance, and the importance of supporting new digital initiatives and services, taken together, are placing unprecedented demands on Network Operations Centers (NOCs) and IT Operations teams inside large, complex organizations like yours.