Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Your first NOG meeting doesn't have to be daunting. Here's what to expect, how to prepare, and how to make the most of every session and conversation. Co-authored by Rob Parker and Gavin Tweedie If you’re trying to optimize your organization’s peering and Internet Exchange (IX) traffic engineering as your network grows, you may be searching for more ways to improve your network or customer experience.

Your apps are slow. Users are complaining. You're staring at a dashboard trying to figure out what broke and when. Sound familiar? This is the reality of reactive network monitoring. By the time someone opens a ticket, the issue has already been affecting performance for minutes, sometimes hours. A network health check flips that script. Instead of chasing problems after the fact, you're catching them before users ever notice.

Cloud adoption has officially crossed a tipping point. In 2026, the conversation is shifting from whether companies are moving to the cloud to how complicated things are getting once they’ve moved. Hybrid architectures, multi-cloud strategies, AI workloads, and rising security pressure are turning “the cloud” into a web of interconnected environments. For IT and network teams, that creates huge opportunity—and plenty of room for chaos if visibility doesn’t keep pace.

Spreadsheets and Visio diagrams may work in small, static environments, but they cannot maintain accurate, real-time records at the port level, track relationships between assets, or support the pace of change in modern operations. DCIM software is purpose-built for those demands. In this blog post, we'll cover what network documentation actually requires, where Excel and Visio fall short, and how DCIM software addresses those gaps.