Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

There is a key difference between having more data and having more answers. That was the theme for Kentik at Networking Field Day 29.

The network is designed to connect the organization’s users, partners, customers and visitors, but those connections are useless without software. While applications run on internal servers, end points and the cloud, the performance of the network in large measure defines the performance of the application, and this performance is what user experience and application experience (AX) is based on.

Syslog is a very common method for transmitting data from network devices and open systems servers data to analytics platforms like Elastic and Splunk. As adaptable as syslog is, it still has significant constraints, which is a pain for most companies that lack the resources to scale their capability needed for syslog.

Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks have been a continuous threat since the advent of the commercial internet. The struggle between security experts and DDoS protection is an asymmetrical war where $30 attacks can jeopardize millions of dollars for companies in downtime and breaches of contract. They can also be a smokescreen for something worse, such as the infiltration of malware.

Recent, high-profile cybersecurity exploits, such as Sun Burst and Log4j, demonstrate that every enterprise is only a stone’s throw from a software vulnerability. This becomes especially critical when security is breached in a network monitoring component that has privileged access to core enterprise systems. In the case of Sun Burst, a well-known monitoring software provider made international headlines.

Migrating to a cloud-based phone system is compelling because it eliminates the costs and time associated with deploying and managing legacy phone system/PBX hardware and proprietary business phones. However, moving 100% of an organization’s communications infrastructure off-site can present new challenges. If the connection to the cloud is lost, a site could lose both external communications and intra-site communications.

In the early years of the internet, it was common to simply use a spreadsheet to manually assign and track IP addresses. We’d be given a generous pool of IP addresses that were not so widely distributed, and most network devices were desktops and not mobile. But this soon got out of hand as networks grew and mobile devices became the norm.

Curious about Microsoft Azure and the best ways to connect? Azure is a hybrid Cloud Service Provider (CSP) with customized, scalable, cloud-based packages. These encompass Software as a Service (SaaS), based on subscription-based software licensing and delivery, Platform as a Service (PaaS), allowing companies to develop, deploy, manage, and update applications, and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), providing high-level application programming interfaces (APIs).