Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Some features start on a roadmap. Others start with a recurring customer request: Can LightMesh connect to Meraki? That request kept coming up. Now the answer is yes. LightMesh supports Meraki sites with multiple VLANs or a single LAN through the new cloud integration for Cisco Meraki. Appliance addressing from Dashboard syncs into LightMesh as subnets (with VLAN ID when Meraki provides one), and device or client LAN IPs only when they fall inside those CIDRs.

Your DHCP server knows which addresses it assigned. It does not know which of those addresses are answering on the wire right now. That gap shows up in every hybrid network where static devices, reservations, and stale leases sit beside active workloads. Leased and live are different questions. DHCP scopes answer the first. Subnet ping-sweep answers the second. Together they give IPAM fresher last-seen context without handing an NMS credentials across the network.

An overlapping subnet can sit quietly for years - until two networks need to connect. A duplicate CIDR (Classless Inter-Domain Routing), an IP address range such as 10.0.0.0/24, may cause you no immediate trouble while networks remain isolated. During an expansion, acquisition, or cloud migration, however, that same overlap can become a connectivity blocker. Cloud peering is one place where the issue becomes unavoidable.

Twenty years ago at RMIT, I became preoccupied with a question that sounded technical but was really about corporate value: could you predict how difficult a company would be to acquire by looking at the shape of its APIs? It was 2006. I was completing Honours in a Bachelor of Applied Science in Software Engineering, and the brief for my research project was unusually open: find an impactful software research hypothesis that hasn’t been done before.

For years, the cloud migration business case was framed around one comparison: “Will AWS be cheaper than our data center?” That question still matters, but it is no longer where the value is. The 2017-2024 wave of mass migration is largely complete. Most enterprise workloads are already in the cloud - often in a lift-and-shift state: oversized instances, commercial-OS BYOL, on-prem-shaped network designs, and legacy frameworks that block the next step.

Infrastructure assessment tools scan your servers and estimate migration cost based on CPU, memory, and storage. They do not read your application code. Applications that appear migration-ready at the infrastructure layer may contain thousands of lines of code that block cloud adoption. Without code-level visibility, teams cannot make accurate 6R decisions.

Modernization assessments move faster when the structure is already in place. Instead of recreating custom fields, interview questions, and assessment workflows for every customer, you can use a custom field template to standardize how data is collected from the start. This guide shows you how to create a reusable Tidal Accelerator custom field template using Node.js and the Tidal API, so your assessments are easier to repeat, compare, and scale. So you’re starting a modernization practice.

Managing DHCP across distributed networks gets messy fast. Lease activity changes constantly. Naming conventions drift. Infrastructure changes happen independently across locations. Before long, your team no longer has a complete view of what’s happening across the network. What started as a straightforward service becomes a records problem with real operational consequences.

Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) activity changes faster than most IP inventory systems can keep up. Devices reconnect. Leases expire. Infrastructure changes constantly across servers, endpoints, and cloud environments. If your IP inventory cannot reflect those changes automatically, teams quickly lose confidence in the data they rely on to operate the network.

Your Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) server already knows what’s connected to your network. The problem is that DHCP data rarely stays aligned with the rest of your infrastructure systems. Instead, it becomes fragmented across Windows servers, branch offices, spreadsheets, and disconnected operational tools. Lease data ages, assignments go untracked, and teams lose confidence in their network inventory.