Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

In this article, we will explore why it is imperative to constantly monitor network security metrics, what Aruba Clearpass is, and how it helps us manage network security. Then we will look at what Graphite and Grafana are and how to analyze metrics with their help. Finally, we will learn how MetricFire can make it easier for us to work with Graphite and Grafana.

The financial sector is in a constant state of change, and institutions must continually adjust to the evolving needs of their customers and the global marketplace. And with availability requirements like the ones European Banking Authority (EBA) provide—99.5%—financial institutions are driven to remain on the bleeding edge of responsiveness and convenience. Banking outages lead to lost consumer confidence and damaged reputations in a sector where trust is the cornerstone of doing business.

This blog post is part of our data centre networking series: In the previous blogs, we covered the architecture and main drivers behind software-defined networking. In this one, we discuss the impact of softwarisation on the other important data centre building blocks, culminating in software-defined data centres (SDDC).

NGINX is a popular web server featuring a wide range of capabilities, including reverse proxy, mail proxy, HTTP cache, and load balancing. It offers TLS offloading and a health check of the backends and supports gRPC, WebSocket, and HTTP/2. In short, NGINX is a one-stop solution for most of your web server needs. When using NGINX, monitoring its metrics is crucial for tackling issues.

Network monitoring tools gather and analyze network data to provide network administrators with information related to the status of network appliances, link saturation, the most active devices, the structure of network traffic or the sources of network problems and traffic anomalies.

It is crucial for network admins to fully understand their network topology. Even basic troubleshooting can be needlessly complicated without a network topology diagram which is vital for building and maintaining a network. A network topology diagram shows how the various components work together; it shows the devices, connections and pathways of a network visually so you can figure out how devices interact and communicate with one another.

The increasing need for mobility has accelerated many organizations’ shift towards wireless networks, commonly known as Wi-Fi networks. The high bit rate and bandwidth offered by wireless networks enable a better networking experience than their wired counterparts. In an ideal network, once you set up your Wi-Fi components, your end users should be able to connect and access your network with ease.

Since the turn of the century, Multi Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) has been the de facto technology for providing organisations with a robust way of connecting branch offices and important sites like corporate headquarters or private data centres. In this blog, we look at how the role of MPLS networks has evolved alongside the emergence of new networking technologies.