Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Think about Outlook, Salesforce or the shared drive your staff open each morning, and at least one of them probably runs in AWS, Azure or Google Cloud. That puts a good share of your traffic on a cloud network nobody on your team has ever seen. You still own a lot of that path (the VPN link, the route tables, the security groups), and it breaks in ways an office network doesn't.

Most network diagrams we come across land in one of two piles: the one drawn for an audit years ago and never opened since, and the one so crowded that finding the firewall takes squinting. The network diagram examples below sit between those piles, 8 diagrams IT teams actually use, sorted into physical, logical, and cloud or WAN. For the full build process behind one map, see our guide to the network topology diagram.

A monitoring dashboard can tell you a server is down. It may not tell you which services depend on it, what changed before the failure, or who should take the next step. Those gaps between systems, people, and processes are often what makes day-to-day IT operations difficult to manage. IT operations management software can help close those gaps, but the label covers very different kinds of products.