Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

What is Network Visibility and How do you Achieve It?

What happens when the segment that failed was never reporting to anything? The incident stops being a diagnosis and turns into a search, and the cost of that search lands on the business rather than on the network team. Network visibility measures how much of your environment can account for itself under pressure. Most teams assume their coverage is broadly complete because their monitoring platform reports thousands of healthy objects.

Observability Masterclass | Trust Before Autonomy: A Framework for AI in Observability

How to Prepare for Human-in-the-Loop AI in Observability AI is rapidly reshaping IT operations, but pushing forward blindly introduces massive risks. To scale automation safely, your teams need the right foundation in place. Join SolarWinds experts for a tactical session on how to strengthen data quality, eliminate tool fragmentation, and establish clear governance guardrails. Discover how to confidently transition from human-managed workflows to safe, guided AI autonomy.

ISP Local Loop Issues: What They Are, What Causes Them, and How to Diagnose Them

Latency spikes that come and go. Packet loss that shows up for a few minutes, then disappears. None of it traces back to anything on your LAN, your firewall, or your switches because it isn't happening there. It's happening on the physical link between your building and your ISP's network: the local loop. This article covers what the ISP local loop is, what typically goes wrong with it, the most common root causes, and how to diagnose a local loop issue using traceroute data and Obkio Insights.

The big question at Black Hat USA 2026: "how do I know?"

Black Hat USA 2026 brought more than 20,000 people to Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. We were there as a Platinum sponsor at booth 4208, and across two days on the business hall floor we had more than 750 conversations with security engineers and architects. Almost every one of them, whatever it started as, turned into a version of the same question: how do I know? How do I know whether a vendor's AI does what the banner says? How do I know what my agents are doing on the network?

How to Analyze Your Network Performance: Reading Obkio's Network Monitoring Session Page

Every pair of Monitoring Agents in your Obkio account create a Network Monitoring Session to monitor network performance between the two agents. Every one of those monitoring sessions comes with its own dedicated page, automatically. You'll find it under the Network Performance tab: click into it, pick a network monitoring session from the list, and the full page loads for that specific connection.

The Role of Infrastructure and Mobile Proxies in Modern Operational Reliability

For systems architects, IT operations leaders, and DevOps engineers navigating cloud-native complexity, maintaining robust system visibility requires unhindered data collection pipelines. Platforms like opsmatters.com offer essential insights into cloud computing, operational tools, and IT service management, highlighting how modern infrastructure relies on seamless data integration. Operating at scale requires monitoring global endpoints, validating geographically distributed microservices, and parsing public software feeds without running into access limits.

Feature Release: Obkio Insights: Automatic Network Diagnostics (Beta)

Today, we’re launching Obkio Insights, our biggest feature yet, in beta, and the one we’ve been building toward for 8 years. Insights is launching in beta. That means existing customers can start using automatic network diagnostics today, with more root cause coverage, refinements, and improvements rolling out over the coming months based on real-world feedback. As with any beta, you may run into the occasional bug or rough edge.

The high cost of low-quality L1 NOC outsourcing

New research from BigPanda reveals what enterprises spend on outsourced IT operations support, what they get in return, and why leaders are ready to rethink the model. Enterprises spend an average of $5.4 million a year on outsourced IT operations support. That’s a substantial investment. It should produce reliable frontline operations: incidents detected, understood, routed, and resolved with the speed and accuracy the business expects. The research shows a different picture.

Essential Steps to Respond to a Ransomware Attack

Cyber threats can paralyze a business in seconds. Malicious programs lock down files and demand payment for access. Fast decisions lower risks and protect company records. Teams must act with speed to stop malware from spreading. Clear actions protect critical business information during security crises. Emergency plans guide staff through stressful incidents smoothly. Fast response efforts keep organizational operations stable during computer breaches.

What Is S3-compatible Backup Storage?

A backup is only useful if the data is still there when something goes wrong — and if it can be restored quickly enough to matter. As backup volumes grow, teams need more capacity without losing control of recovery performance or cost. S3-compatible backup storage gives teams another way to handle that pressure. It uses the familiar Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) API model without requiring backup data to live in Amazon S3 itself.

Why AI Adoption Fails Without Operational Maturity First

Most MSPs are already experimenting with AI in some form, and every vendor at every conference has an AI for MSPs pitch ready. Few have stopped to check whether their own operations are solid enough to scale. Our 2026 IT Trends Report found that three-quarters of IT leaders believe they have an AI policy, while fewer than half of help desk staff agree. That’s the real risk: AI doesn’t fix drift, unclear ownership, or gaps between what’s documented and what’s actually happening.

Obkio's Status Overview Widget: Know What's Wrong and Where, Instantly

Obkio is making improvements to its network performance monitoring and observability solution, aimed at helping users of every expertise level interpret their data more efficiently. That work isn't just about telling users something is wrong. It's about diagnosing the issue for them. And a big part of that is telling them where the issue is happening, so they know exactly where to direct their troubleshooting effort instead of guessing. The Status Overview widget solves this.

Cloud Migration for Financial Services Operations

The financial services industry, traditionally cautious and reliant on legacy on-premise infrastructure, is now decisively shifting its operations to the cloud. This migration is driven by the urgent need for greater agility, improved operational efficiency, and the capacity to innovate at the speed of a rapidly changing market. Moving beyond simple data storage, financial institutions are re-architecting their core functions to harness the full potential of cloud computing, transforming everything from customer-facing applications to back-office transaction processing.

How Network Documentation Software Keeps Network Diagrams Current

When did anyone last open your network diagram and trust what it showed? A diagram drawn in a static drawing tool is accurate on the day it is saved. One quarter, two circuit upgrades and a hardware refresh later, it describes a network that no longer exists. Nothing warns you that this has happened. The file still opens, still prints, and still gets attached to change requests, which is what makes it risky during an incident.

Why latency is important when choosing an IP backbone provider

As businesses rely on cloud computing, AI, real-time communications and globally distributed applications, network latency has become a defining factor in overall network performance. While bandwidth determines how much data can be transferred, latency determines how quickly that data reaches its destination. Even a high-bandwidth connection can deliver poor application performance if latency is too high or inconsistent.

Europe Can't Find 5 Gigawatts. So It Gets Creative | Ben Baldieri, Founder of The GPU

Everyone is talking about multi-gigawatt AI data centers. Europe is solving a different challenge. In this episode of Uplink, Michael Reid sits down with Ben Baldieri, Founder of The GPU, to explore how power constraints, fragmented regulation, and limited grid capacity are reshaping Europe's AI infrastructure landscape.

What is a Tier 1 IP backbone, and why does it matter?

Every time you join a video meeting, move data between cloud environments or use an AI-powered application, your traffic travels across a complex network of interconnected infrastructure. At the heart of this global ecosystem sits the internet backbone – and the highest-performing networks within it are known as Tier 1 IP backbones.

Network Monitoring for 1,000+ Devices at Scale

A network monitoring platform can handle more than 1,000 devices, but the device total is only the starting point. A workable design must keep polling cycles on time, preserve visibility during failures, control notification volume, support the devices you own, and recover cleanly when the monitoring system itself has a problem. Crossing 1,000 monitored devices changes the job.

What Should Businesses Consider Before Deploying Microsoft Teams Rooms Across Multiple Meeting Spaces?

Hybrid work has become a permanent part of the modern workplace, making reliable collaboration technology more important than ever. As organisations expand, many are investing in Microsoft Teams Rooms to create consistent, high-quality meeting experiences across multiple offices and meeting spaces.

Introducing Obkio's Severity Summary Widget: See Network Events at a Glance

Obkio’s new Severity Summary widget is built to answer one question fast: “How healthy was my network overall, across every session I'm tracking?” Instead of opening session after session to check each one individually, you get a single combined view showing how much time your network spent in each severity level.

12 Top SD-WAN Solutions for Growing Enterprises (2026)

Adding branches, cloud applications, contractors, and connected equipment changes the WAN problem. The network must steer traffic intelligently, preserve application quality during poor link conditions, and apply consistent controls without creating a separate operational stack at every location.

ICMP Port Number: Why Ping Has No Port and What to Open

ICMP has no port number. It is an IP-layer protocol, number 1 in the IP header, that sits beside TCP and UDP rather than on top of them, so ping does not use a port and there is no "ping port" to open. When a firewall form asks for one, select the ICMP protocol and the echo request type instead. This post covers where ICMP sits in the stack, which types and codes you will actually meet, how to allow it through Linux, Windows and cloud firewalls, and when a ping check is the wrong check.

Data Center: More or Less | SolarWinds TechPod

In this episode, Sean and Crystal explore the complex and rapidly evolving landscape of AI, data center impacts, regulation challenges, and societal implications. They discuss the urgency of establishing standards and the lessons from historical industrial revolutions to navigate AI's future responsibly.

Why Your Internet Is Slow: Is It Your Network, ISP, or Your Machine?

Someone on your team says "the Internet is slow." Twenty minutes later, IT finds out the Internet was never the problem. Maybe it was a laptop with a full RAM disk. Maybe it was an ISP outage two towns over that had nothing to do with your office. Misdiagnosing slow Internet wastes time. It sends you down the wrong fix path, like rebooting a router when the real issue is sitting on someone's desktop.

How Packet Analysis Accelerates Root Cause Analysis for Application Performance Issues

Back when I was a network administrator, one of the most frustrating phrases I would hear was: “The application is slow.” Today, after years of working with customers, not much has changed. The technologies are different, the networks are faster, and the applications are increasingly distributed across data centers, cloud platforms, and SaaS providers, but the troubleshooting challenge is often the same. Users know something is slow. Application teams believe the servers are healthy.

Stop Guessing Where the Network Broke

Modern IT teams invest heavily in monitoring infrastructure, applications, servers, and network devices. Yet when users report that a critical cloud service is slow or a branch office loses connectivity, one question often remains difficult to answer: where is the problem actually occurring? Is the issue inside your network? Is it your ISP? Has a routing change introduced excessive latency? Did an upstream provider experience an outage?

Migrating from Nagios XI to WhatsUp Gold: A Practical Step-by-Step Guide

Monitoring platforms rarely become complex overnight. In many Nagios XI environments, complexity builds gradually through years of useful customizations, custom plugins, one-off fixes, and undocumented operational knowledge. Each addition may have solved a real problem at the time, but over the years the result can become difficult to maintain, explain, and hand over to new administrators.

A Guide to DDoS Protection in Your Network

Learn how DDoS attacks work, how threats are evolving, and how modern network-integrated protection can help defend your infrastructure. Network connectivity is the frontline of revenue generation and customer trust for almost every modern enterprise. But as digital footprints expand across hybrid and multicloud environments, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks continue to grow in volume, frequency, and sophistication.

What is Port Mirroring and How does a SPAN Port Work?

Your dashboard shows every interface green, the counters look clean, and the application owner still insists the network is dropping their transactions. Where do you look next? Availability data tells you a link is up. It cannot tell you what crossed that link or how long the server took to answer. Only the packets carry that, and port mirroring is how most engineers get a copy without cutting into a live cable.

What Is OTN?

The Optical Transport Network (OTN) is a widely deployed industry-standard protocol that provides a comprehensive framework for multiplexing, switching, and transporting diverse digital payloads over optical fiber. Modern service providers face growing pressure to consolidate diverse traffic types. OTN acts as a universal digital wrapper, encapsulating Ethernet, IP, SONET/SDH, and storage (Fibre Channel) traffic into a single, highly efficient transport layer.

What is Network Intelligence? A Guide for IT Teams

"This is the third slowdown at the regional offices this quarter. What is actually causing it, and what will it cost us to stop?" Questions phrased like that come from a business head rather than an engineer, and a dashboard screenshot will not answer them. Most network operations groups can produce evidence that something happened. Producing an explanation of why it happened, in language a finance director will accept, takes hours of manual correlation across separate consoles.

WiFi Monitoring 101: What It Is and Why Remote Teams Need It

For years, IT teams had a fairly contained job: keep the office network running. Every device, router, and switch that mattered was inside a building they controlled. That job doesn't exist anymore. Remote and hybrid work moved the "network" into hundreds of living rooms, home offices, and coffee shops, none of which IT can see, configure, or troubleshoot directly. So when a help desk ticket comes in saying "the app is slow" or "my calls keep dropping," IT is left guessing. Is it the company's network?

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.

What Is a ROADM?

A Reconfigurable Optical Add-Drop Multiplexer (ROADM) is a network element that selectively routes specific wavelengths of light across a fiber optic network without converting the signals into the electrical domain, forming the very foundation of modern optical transport networks. It allows operators to manage data traffic dynamically at the photonic layer. Fixed OADMs came first.

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.

Why QKD Is Gaining Attention in Critical Infrastructure Security

A power supply company has planned a renovation. Well, replacing the office furniture and appliances is not a hassle, but then changing the cryptography embedded in substations, control centers, field gateways, and decade-old operational technology requires different planning and execution. In most cases, these systems have been in service long after encryption protecting them has become questionable.

Introducing Megaport CLI: Provision and Automate Your Network from the Terminal and Pipeline

Bring network provisioning into your workflow with Megaport CLI, built for repeatable changes from the terminal, scripts, and CI/CD pipelines. When everything runs through a pipeline, changes are reviewable, repeatable, and consistent from staging to production. Your application code ships that way. Your cloud resources provision that way. Then you need a Megaport connection. So you open the Portal, and step outside the pipeline.

What Is Network Latency? Causes, How to Measure It, and Ways to Reduce It

Slow application complaints are among the hardest tickets in IT to close. The network gets blamed first; the dashboard shows nothing wrong, and the ticket bounces between teams for a week. Network latency sits at the centre of that argument more often than any other metric. Most dashboards report latency as a single average, and that average hides the slow requests people actually notice. A path can average 30 ms and still drop a call every ten minutes.

Progress WhatsUp Gold Recognized as a SPARK Matrix Leader in Network Observability

We’re proud to share that the Progress WhatsUp Gold solution has been recognized as a Leader in the QKS Group SPARK Matrix: Network Observability report, ahead of other vendors such as SolarWinds, Paessler PRTG and LogicMonitor to name a few. The recognition highlights the WhatsUp Gold network monitoring capabilities that help organizations gain deeper visibility into complex network environments while delivering impactful benefits for customers.

Essential Tech Upgrades To Boost Your Airbnb Bookings

If you run an Airbnb, you're probably always looking for ways to boost your bookings and make your rental more lucrative. Unfortunately, a successful Airbnb requires more than fresh linens and a prime location. Most travelers expect a seamless, modern experience from the moment they book, and they need to be able to check in quickly without having to worry about keys or other arrangements. What can you do to improve guest satisfaction in a single cozy studio or a portfolio of luxury vacation rentals? Here's everything you need to know.

How Entry Level Technology Skills Can Help You Build A Stronger Cybersecurity Career

Starting your cybersecurity career with some technology experience is a good move. The technology field is broad, but, overall, it refers to general technological concepts. Cybersecurity is about securing systems or networks, but, to a large extent, it is necessary to have some background information regarding technology in general. Entry level technology skills will provide the background needed to understand potential problems and the confidence needed to move forward in your career.