Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

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.

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.

With VoIP monitoring, you hear about a bad call before anyone opens a ticket. Voice handles trouble worse than most traffic on your network. When a file download drops packets, it just asks for them again. A live call has no time for that. A 2% burst of packet loss, which a download wouldn't notice, is enough for everyone on the call to hear a gap. Most of those problems start on the network path, which you can measure and fix.

When a branch office can’t reach the ERP system and customer calls start dropping, who gets the call? It’s almost always the network administrator. What that person does the rest of the week is less clear, and a CIO, a CFO and the admin themselves would probably each describe it differently. Part of the reason is how much the network has grown. Ten years ago it was mostly switches, cables and one building.

See how packet-level and DevTools throttling produce different performance results, and learn which method reveals the network costs that slow your pages.

The recent PHP security emergency has highlighted how vulnerabilities in widely used web technologies can quickly become a significant cybersecurity concern. It is also a reminder that protecting internet-facing applications requires more than keeping software up to date. Organisations need a layered security strategy to protect applications, maintain availability and mitigate malicious traffic.

FortiGate, PAN-OS and Zscaler now each have a six-dashboard pack in the Dashboard Library, live on every Logs stack. If your firewall logs already arrive as parsed module fields, the Library pre-selects the matching pack. If they don't, it won't, even when the firewall has been sending syslog for years. This post is about that gap: which parsed fields each pack reads, the Filebeat module settings that produce them, and the API checks that tell you whether the dashboards will fill before you install them.