Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

November 2022

Network Performance Reporting Feature Release

Obkio’s long-awaited Network Performance Reporting feature is now available for all users of Obkio’s Network Monitoring App. Create custom network monitoring reports to simplify and visualize the analysis of information in your network. Learn more about how to access and use Network Performance Reporting with Obkio.

Broadcom Software Debuts the Experience-Driven NOC at DoDIIS 2022

Command, control, and communications (C3) systems are fundamental to all military operations, and the network is the backbone to keeping the warfighter up to date and out of harm's way. The right network modernization strategies will enable the latest C3 capabilities to provide real-time situation awareness and decision support for today’s military operations.

Kentik Kube: Container Network Performance Monitoring

In this brief demo, Phil Gervasi explains how you can use Kentik Kube to monitor K8s network performance among your containers on-premises and in public cloud. With Kube, you can get granular visibility into container performance in terms of packet loss, packet size, protocol and application activity, TCP flags, and network latency.

MSSP Maturity Levels and Building Out Your Offering - Empower 2022 Panel

As an MSP you have a choice to make: Do I keep swimming in the shallow end of the security pool or make my way out to the deep end and become an MSSP? Every MSP needs to be thinking about and actioning a security-minded practice, but do you have to go all in? Of course not. In this MSSP-led partner panel, Joe Panettieri of MSSP Alert dives in on the details surrounding the make or break decision points MSPs face today around security and whether to become an MSSP, merge with or buy one, or simply partner to offer advanced managed security services. Whichever path your on or you choose, these panelists have insight you’ll want to hear.

Close the Cloud Monitoring Gap with Network Observability

To fully capitalize on the promises of digital transformation, IT leaders have come to recognize that a mix of cloud and data center infrastructure provides several business advantages, including increased agility, cost efficiencies, global availability, and, ultimately, better customer experiences.

WireGuard vs OpenVPN: Which VPN Protocol Is Better?

VPNs use protocols to create a secure and anonymous internet connection. OpenVPN and WireGuard are some of the most popular VPN protocols in town. Whereas OpenVPN has been a fan favorite for over two decades, the new contender on the market, WireGuard, is making big waves in the VPN industry. However, the question remains, which one is better? OpenVPN or WireGuard? This article aims to give you this answer.

Flowmon Anomaly Detection & MISP

Back in 2021 we have introduced the integration between MISP, a community threat intelligence sharing platform and Flowmon ADS. The integration turns indicators of compromise shared through MISP to actionable intelligence. Flowmon ADS will automatically pick up on latest indicators of compromise using MISP API and leverage those indicators of compromise to detect adversary activities in the target network. The integration is available in Flowmon ADS 11.2 and newer versions.

Multi-cloud trends in the healthcare sector

In the last few years, driven in no small part by the impact of the pandemic, cloud technology has had a profound effect on healthcare. Despite being one of the last sectors to go all-in on public cloud, the maturity of offerings seems to be finally winning the industry over, opening up significant opportunities for telemedicine and virtual care to adapt to evolving patient and workforce needs.

4 Most Common Website Security Threats (2023) + Solutions

For infrastructure administrators tasked with ensuring the reliable operation of their applications, the thought of a lurking cyberattack can be one to lose sleep over. An attack on your system and the services you provide could render your applications unresponsive, resulting in a security breach, or loss of data.

3 Most Common SD-WAN Issues

We’ve all been stuck in traffic congestion on the road at some point in our lives. Traffic congestion may happen when there’s too many cars on the road, when there’s an accident or a closed street. Network congestion isn’t too different from that - but instead of cars causing congestion, it’s network traffic. That’s why, in this article, we’re running you through how to detect network congestion with Network Monitoring tools.

Crous Paris Mitigates Network Outages Before Students Notice with Progress WhatsUp Gold

The Paris location serves approximately 300,000 students and 1,000 staff. With so many people on campus, Crous Paris needs their network and servers to be in top-notch working condition. WhatsUp Gold allows us to fix a problem quickly and simply, without having to connect to each server individually in order to locate the malfunction.

Cybercrime Trends and the Economy

It’s no secret that there is a lot of money involved in cybercrime. With McAfee estimating the annual global cost of cybercrime at just under $1 trillion, the dark side of tech is big business. Clearly, those losses have an impact on the global economy. It’s also become a pressing question to see if macroeconomic/geopolitical trends impact cybercrime.

What is Network Flow Monitoring, and Why You Shouldn't Live Without It

Old network salts likely know all about network flows and the value of network flow monitoring. As former News Editor for Network World and Editor in Chief of Network Computing, network flows are part of my old stomping grounds. In fact, I remember when Cisco invented NetFlow in the late 1990’s to collect traffic data from its routers and switches so it could be analyzed by network pros.

Building AppStack Dashboards

AppStack™ helps you diagnose and troubleshoot performance problems faster—from applications to servers, virtualized infrastructure, databases, and storage systems. The AppStack dashboard shows you all performance information across the application stack with relationships between various elements of your environment. Kevin M. Sparenberg, SolarWinds THWACK Community Evangelist, shows you how the dashboard works and why it’s so important for troubleshooting application issues in your IT infrastructure.

What is Network Performance Monitoring?

When you think about improving visibility into your IT environment, monitoring applications and the other infrastructure that hosts them might be the first thing that may come to your mind. Although infrastructure and application monitoring are two important components of an overall monitoring strategy, an equally vital part – and one that is easier to overlook – is network monitoring. If your network fails or underperforms, your applications will also experience problems.

Hidden Costs of Cloud Networking: Optimizing for the Cloud - Part 3

I used the first two parts of this series to lay out my case for how and why cloud-based networks can effectively “Trojan horse” costs into your networking spend and highlighted some real-world instances I’ve come across in my career. In the third and final installment of this series, I want to focus on ways you can optimize your personnel and cloud infrastructures to prevent or offset some of these novel costs.

Optimize Your NOC with DX NetOps and Automic Automation

Learn how Automic can help NetOps speed up triage, reduce MTTR, and alleviate the load on your NOC Today’s network team is committed to advancing the speed of triage and resolution. This can be a titanic task in modern networks, which are fueled by SDN and becoming more agile and dynamic than ever. These new networks have introduced traffic, congestion, and outages on a greater scale.

HAProxyConf 2022 Recap

Earlier this month, I packed my bag and grabbed my lanyard to attend HAProxyConf in the beautiful city of Paris. I was far from alone: nearly 200 customers, colleagues, and community enthusiasts had the same idea. We overcame jetlag, stagefright, and introverted personality types for the joy of meeting and learning from some of the brightest minds in the industry. From load balancing to cybersecurity to endless cups of strong coffee: this is HAProxyConf 2022!

Intelligent Network Monitoring and Visibility - and Why It Matters

As today’s networks grow increasingly complex, your network application and security teams are all struggling with network communications, hidden threats and misconfigurations. Each of these issues allows various vectors, increasing the likelihood of a cybersecurity incident. Often an incident occurs because an organization lacks a single pane of view, the right information sharing, and an automated, inter-departmental workflow.

5 Web Security Tips For Small Businesses

Small businesses often overlook the importance of web security, but it is an essential component of any successful online presence. Without proper web security measures, your website and business can be vulnerable to various cyber threats, from hackers to spammers. To protect your business and customers, here are five essential tips on improving your website's security.

BGP Monitoring with Catchpoint: Finding and Fixing BGP Issues - FAST

BGP is effectively the postal service of the Internet. Without BGP, traffic doesn't move. So, when there's a configuration issue, or worse, malicious activity – the repercussions can be huge. That's why constant monitoring of BGP traffic is crucial. In this ten-minute video, Solutions Engineer Zach Henderson explains why BGP issues can damage your bottom line and then shows how to quickly detect, analyze and resolve them with Catchpoint's market-leading BGP Monitoring solution.

How the telco industry is embracing blockchain innovation

Driven by customer demand, automation has enabled great strides in enterprise networking. Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) has unlocked the ability for organisations to set up and tear down links between assets and scale bandwidth in real-time, matching the capabilities of the cloud. But in the back end, especially when it comes to settlement, many service providers still rely on manual processes, and this is where blockchain innovation offers much promise.

Shorten Recovery from Cyberattack with Cove's Standby Image

With a new standby image feature, N-able’s Cove Data Protection adds speed to the security, savings, and convenience of its cloud-first solution. You now have the ability to keep a local copy of your data on standby, shortening your time to recovery in the event of a cyberattack.

SD-WAN Troubleshooting: How to Troubleshoot SD-WAN Networks

SD-WAN networks are more popular than ever. With the increasing use of cloud-based applications, many businesses rely on SD-WAN services to deliver optimal Internet, cloud, and UC performance. But like all networks, SD-WAN can experience network issues that affect user experience and network performance. So keep reading to learn how to troubleshoot SD-WAN networks using Network Monitoring.

Webinar Snippet: How to Troubleshoot SD-WAN Networks | Obkio

Check out the snippet from our latest webinar, How to Troubleshoot SD-WAN Networks. Obkio VP and Lead Network Geek explains Obkio's SD-WAN monitoring design. Obkio is a simple Network Monitoring & Troubleshooting SaaS solution that continuously monitors network and core business applications performance to identify intermittent issues and improve the end-user experience.

Avoid These Five Cloud Networking Deployment Mistakes

When transitioning from physical infrastructure to the cloud, it’s easy to think that your networks will instantly be faster, more reliable, and produce windfalls of cost savings overnight. Unfortunately, this wishful line of thinking fails to account for some of the complexities of cloud networking and is one of the biggest drivers of the cloud deployment mistakes we see.

What is SD-WAN technology, and how does it work?

In recent years, Software-Defined WAN Technology (SD-WAN) has changed the way networking professionals secure, manage, and optimize connectivity. As organizations continue to implement cloud applications, conventional backhaul traffic processes are now inefficient and can cause security concerns. SD-WAN is a virtual architecture that enables organizations to use different combinations of transport services that can connect users to applications.

Research on Optical Module in FPGA Optical Fiber Transmission Circuit

The optical fiber data transmission circuit is divided into five parts: optical fiber transmission, photoelectric signal conversion, signal acquisition and transmission, data processing, and data transmission. Optical signals are transmitted between measurement systems through optical fibers; photoelectric signal conversion is performed by optical interface adapters and optical modules to convert signals into photoelectric and electro-optical signals.

Being Secure When Moving to the Cloud - N-able Chief Security Officer David MacKinnon - Empower 2022

When it comes to cloud adoption, the analogy Dave MacKinnon always use is that our networks used to be built like castles. We put all our servers and users inside, and we had big walls to protect everything. Today, we’ve shifted large parts of our businesses outside of these walls, and moved them to various cloud and SaaS providers. As a result, we no longer always have the knowledge or expertise to secure and protect them. So, a core part of the journey towards owning the cloud is understanding what you can do to help your customers secure all those bits that now lie outside the castle walls.

Why Hybrid Network Monitoring is Key for Retailers This Holiday Season

The main street in my town is mostly lined with mom-and-pop shops, and I love to support these businesses. Large online retailers keep making it harder for these stores to compete, so I think it’s important to keep doing business with them when I can. Lately, it’s been interesting to see that these mom-and-pop shops increasingly have something in common with the largest online retailers: They’re reliant on the internet to deliver their goods and services to consumers.

Suppressing Dissent: The Rise of the Internet Curfew

In the evening on September 30, people across Cuba found their internet service cut. The residents of this Caribbean nation had begun protesting their government’s tepid response to Hurricane Ian which had wrought destruction a week earlier. Internet service returned to normal the following morning, but this outage wasn’t caused by storm-related damage. This blackout was a deliberate act, a fact confirmed when service dropped out for the same period of time the following day.

Internet 101: A Complete Guide and Explanation of the Internet

The internet is inherently complex, and it can be difficult to understand all the various moving parts that make it work. But that doesn't mean you can learn a little more about what makes the World Wide Web tick. In this article, you'll learn what the internet is, how it's structured, and how information flows across the web.

Playing to Win in the Cloud - Mike Adler Empower 2022 Keynote

Playing to Win in the Cloud—During this keynote, Mike Adler (N-able’s CTPO) shares how to play a winning hand in the cloud, sharing information about the best practices, success stories, and N-able’s roadmap to help all of our partners deal themselves a winning hand when it comes to managing, monitoring, and protecting cloud assets. Joining him on stage, Stefan Voss, Laura DuBois and Subo Guha have demos of products and a look into the product roadmap.

Everything You Need to Know About Synthetic Testing

Part two of a three-part guide to assuring performance and availability of critical cloud services across public and hybrid clouds and the internet Monitoring your user traffic is critical for knowing the quality of the digital experience you are delivering, but what about the performance of new cloud or container deployments, expected new users in a new region, or new web pages or applications that don’t have established traffic? This is where synthetic testing can be invaluable.

Using Kentik Synthetics for Your Cloud Monitoring Needs

The final post of a three-part guide to assuring performance and availability of critical cloud services across public and hybrid clouds and the internet Kentik Synthetics adds integrated, autonomous, pervasive performance test telemetry to our market-leading network traffic analytics and observability platform, the Kentik Network Observability Platform. For modern clouds, proactive synthetic monitoring can no longer be delivered as a standalone tool.

5 Important Operations Issues to Consider When Working With an International Team

In a world where remote work is becoming more and more common, international teams are the new normal. Organizations now have the opportunity to tap into a global pool of talent but working with team members in different time zones and cultures comes with challenges. From communication and collaboration to managing expectations and building trust, there are several important factors to consider when working with an international team.

SolarWinds Review: SolarWinds vs. MetricFire

SolarWinds is a network and application monitoring solution, but primarily a network monitoring solution. Founded in 1999, the company has built an online community of 150,000 registered users. However, monitoring has come a long way since the early 2000s. How does SolarWinds stack up against MetricFire in terms of features and pricing? In this article, we break down the comparison into easily digestible, unbiased information to help you make an informed decision.

Do VPNs Really Keep Your Browsing Data Private?

The internet is helpful, but it can also be dangerous. With cybercriminals on the hunt for your precious data and intrusive government agencies spying on the activities of everyday citizens, internet security and privacy have become a genuine concern. Your internet service provider has a front-row seat to all of your private browsing data, and they can monitor you, throttle you, and share that information at will. If this sounds like a gross invasion of privacy, you're absolutely right!

Kentik takes network observability to KubeCon 2022

If you’re an engineer trying to fix real problems with your apps, looking at just one small part of the picture isn’t going to cut it. This is why Kentik is so focused on helping you understand what’s going on beyond single k8s instances, and it’s a big part of what network observability is all about. This was Kentik’s message at Kubecon 2022, which was a memorable event for us.

Solving for cloud/multi-cloud network complexity

Networking in multi-cloud / hybrid cloud / data center environments continues to grow in complexity and so does the inherent challenge of monitoring traffic and resource utilization. Join industry expert and podcaster Eric Wright as he leads a discussion with Kentik and Alkira about observability practices and methods for network, cloud, virtualization, and application ops teams. What you’ll learn.

Using the REST API Monitoring Support in WhatsUp Gold

With the REST API Monitoring in WhatsUp Gold's Application Performance Monitoring (APM), you can monitor applications by creating components in a custom Application Profile. For example, if you need to monitor PAS for OpenEdge, you can use the integrated Application Profile to query its OEManager and HealthCheck APIs. Our team of engineers has developed a comprehensive technical guide detailing exactly how to set up this kind of functionality in WhatsUp Gold.

Network Monitoring for Dummies

Network Monitoring For Dummies helps you recognize best practices for monitoring and managing your organization's network, how to grasp network monitoring fundamentals, define alerts and actions, and much more. In this special edition, you'll learn best practices and key concepts for network monitoring from WhatsUp Gold's Product Expert Mark Towler and author and editor Doug Barney.

Network Documentation Best Practices: What to Create & Why

Everybody agrees network documentation is extremely important, but there tends not to be a lot of agreement on what that documentation should include. The short answer is that it should include everything that’s relevant—but what that means varies between networks. For example, in a really small network with one switch and a firewall, and perhaps a single wireless access point, there isn’t much to document. It might be enough to put everything in a single diagram.

Protecting Your VoIP Infrastructure From DDoS Attacks

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are an ongoing issue for communications service providers, putting critical systems at risk, undercutting service level agreements, and bringing unwanted headlines. In the first half of 2022 6 million of these attacks were reported. Some metrics of DDoS attacks in 1H2022 compared to 2H2021.

Scaling Up, One Network Bottleneck at a Time

Processing data at scale involves moving packets through a network—but what happens when that network isn't cooperative? Anatole Beuzon, a Software Engineer at Datadog, discusses how he investigated and resolved network issues in Datadog’s larger data-processing apps and how you can apply these same methods to your own production workloads.

Are you a network observability champion?

At Kentik, we pride ourselves as innovators and thought-leaders for network observability. “Kentik is network observability” is more than a slogan for us. It’s an idea that informs our product roadmap and guides our problem-solving with customers. We’ve done a lot to explain network observability to prospects.

The real cost of latency

In networking, latency - sometimes referred to as 'lag' - is the delay between a client request and the service provider's response. In a cloud environment this could be a developer or end-user client request, and the cloud service provider’s response. Or for multi-cloud, it could be one application in a cloud instance, talking to another application in another cloud instance. But no matter which type, latency can have a real impact on an organisation.

15 Best Linux Networking Commands and Scripts You Should Know

Both servers and software development use Linux. Today, Linux distributions are used by the vast majority of electronics and embedded systems. Worldwide, Linux servers make up about 90% of all internet servers. Additionally, the Linux kernel is used by around 80% of all smartphones. Today, every system in the world is linked via a network. Information exchange across systems requires network connectivity. Computer networking refers to communication over the internet as well as within a network.

Achieving Operational Excellence with N-able

After 20+ years as an N-able partner, Dave Brewer and BC Networks believe the operational excellence they've achieved sets them apart from other MSPs. Brewer sat down with N-able at Empower 2022 to talk about his journey with N-able, how his company uses N-central, SentinelOne EDR, and DNS Filter. Brewer also discussed what he thinks are the most important things for MSPs to look for in 2023 and why cybersecurity is such a high priority.

Secure Cookies Using HAProxy Enterprise

My colleague Baptiste previously published an article on how to protect cookies while offloading SSL. I recently encountered a customer who wanted to achieve a very similar goal but using a more recent HAProxy Enterprise version. This post will explain the best practices for how to secure your cookies using HAProxy Enterprise.

Microsoft Teams Troubleshooting Performance and Connection Issues

How many times has this happened? You’re on a Microsoft Teams call, and your call disconnects, lags or freezes - so you go to Google to look up how to solve the problem. Well look no further! We’re teaching you the how to’s of Microsoft Teams troubleshooting to solve common Microsoft Teams performance issues and connection issues using Network Monitoring!

True Network Monitoring ROI Means Upgrading Your NetOps Strategies

Running network operations today is more complicated than ever before. Networks are growing in size and complexity due to modern network architecture adoption, but organizations are not hiring more staff to compensate for this increased complexity and demand. The prevailing mentality seems to be to do more with what you have.

User Experience for Observability

Modern software applications involve multiple layers of code and services, working together to meet increasingly demanding user requirements. To achieve this, systems became distributed, providing improved scalability, fault tolerance, and complexity. However, this innovation brought new challenges to basic troubleshooting and performance monitoring to maintain the health of systems. It’s for these reasons that observability is trending.

10 Best Open Source Switch Port Monitoring Tools

Switch port monitoring is one of the most crucial facets of network management. It not only provides insights into network switch port status but CPU load, memory utilization, historical port utilization, and more. Investing in switch port monitoring improves network-related performance across your organization and optimizes port usage. As a result, you'll enhance security, reduce cybercrime, optimize networks, enhance compliance, and safeguard your entire IT infrastructure.

9 Best Open Source Network Monitoring Tools

Network monitoring is a critical component of your network management strategy that provides valuable insights into network-related problems which can affect your organization. When you monitor networks regularly, you'll mitigate risks like overloaded networks, router problems, downtime, cybercrime, and data loss. Network monitoring lets you: All successful companies invest in network monitoring tools that provide accurate insights into performance, speed, security, and productivity.

DX UIM 20.4 CU5: What's New and Why Upgrade

For DX Unified Infrastructure Management (DX UIM) customers, there are significant benefits to be gained by staying current with the latest releases—and that’s especially true now. The latest version, release 20.4 cumulative update (CU) 5, offers a significant number of enhancements and new capabilities. This new release provides teams with a number of advantages, including increased flexibility, improved operational efficiency, and enhanced insights.

SolarWinds Day October 2022 - Observability for All

To kick off our first SolarWinds Day, we are pleased to announce the launch of SolarWinds Observability, our new cloud-native SaaS offering. It combines application, infrastructure, database, network, digital experience, and log analysis into a single, integrated platform. This full-stack approach provides a centralized view of your IT infrastructure and services and delivers powerful functionality to help businesses and organizations of any size maximize their time and resources.

The SolarWinds Platform

The SolarWinds Platform is designed to connect with your critical business services, to provide flexibility, visibility, and control—wherever your environment lives and wherever you’re going next. It’s the simplicity you expect from SolarWinds, with deployment models to support you today and tomorrow, from on-premises to cloud-native SaaS solutions.

Kentik Market Intelligence just increased its IQ - introducing KMI Insights!

Early this year we launched Kentik Market Intelligence (KMI). If you missed it, KMI enumerates transit and peering relationships as well as produces rankings based on the volume of IP space transited by ASes in different geographies. Using tables and charts, KMI offers a global view of the internet out-of-the-box without any configuration or setup. KMI uses public BGP routing data to rank ASes based on their advertised IP space.

How to monitor Nginx

Are you interested in learning how to monitor Nginx? In this post, we'll show you all about how Nginx works and how you can use Hosted Graphite to monitor it. First, we'll read what Nginx monitoring is all about and how it can together work with Prometheus. Nginx, pronounced like “engine-ex”, is an open-source web server that, since its initial success as a web server, is now also used as a reverse proxy, HTTP cache, and load balancer.

How to Assemble the Ultimate Network Management Toolset

Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) research determined that network infrastructure teams are challenged to monitor infrastructures that include hybrid public and private clouds. Their findings are that teams need to be more strategic in building their network management toolset. Based on this latest research from EMA, this white paper offers a guide to building the ultimate network management toolset.

What is Network Log Management?

It's no secret: if you manage a network, every device connected generates a log. These logs tell an extremely important story about events that have happened on your network and are a vital part of helping you easily understand network activities, user actions and more. With WhatsUp Gold's Log Management you can monitor, filter, search, and alert on logs for every device in your network while also watching for meta trends like log volume changes.