Beginning at 8:44 UTC (4:44am EDT) on July 8, 2022, Canadian telecommunications giant Rogers Communications suffered a catastrophic outage taking down nearly all services for its 11 million customers in what is arguably the largest internet outage in Canadian history. Internet services began to return after 15 hours of downtime and were still being restored throughout the following day.
Kentik Synthetics is all about proactively testing and monitoring specific elements of your network, the services it relies on, and the applications it delivers. That means using artificial traffic instead of end-user traffic to test a variety of aspects of digital experience monitoring like device availability, DNS activity, web application page load times, and BGP activity. But to test an end-user’s experience interacting with a website, we need to approach things differently.
In our quest to provide the leading network observability solution, Kentik has been focused on developing a service for NetOps teams that empowers them to have intimate knowledge of their network traffic and the devices that route traffic. Our service helps them plan capacity, project costs, optimize routes, detect unwanted traffic, troubleshoot issues and analyze events.
It was really great to see so many old friends again at Cisco Live this year in Las Vegas. It’s been a few years since I’ve been to a conference other than a few small work events, so it was exciting to wander the World of Solutions, talk to people at the many booths, and bump into people I knew online but never met in person.
On Tuesday, June 7, internet users in numerous countries from East Africa to the Middle East to South Asia experienced an hours-long degradation in service due to an outage at one of the internet’s most critical chokepoints: Egypt. Beginning at approximately 12:25 UTC, multiple submarine cables connecting Europe and Asia experienced outages lasting over four hours. As I show below, the impacts were visible in various types of internet measurement data to the affected countries.
Kentik Synthetics is all about proactive monitoring. With synthetic monitoring, you can investigate users’ digital experience by peeling back, layer by layer, exactly what’s going on in every aspect of the digital experience from the network layer all the way to application. Because synthetic tests can be so granular, the results provide different information than you can get from flows, streaming telemetry or other observability data.
New Relic is known for empowering the world’s leading engineering teams to deliver great software performance and reliability. And the network that delivers that service to New Relic’s users plays a critical role. Hiccups in the performance of the network between New Relic’s mission-critical service and their users can create a cascade of problems.
Peering is more than just setting up sessions with any AS that will accept one. Peering can involve long-term relationships that require reviews and joint-planning to grow synergy. A critical milestone in any peering relationship is the business review – and when it comes to business reviews, it’s all about preparation. So where to start?
Nobody actually cares about the network. Provocative words coming from a network visibility company, you might be thinking. However, consider what you’re doing right now. You’re reading a blog on a website, maybe clicking around other tabs, possibly streaming some music, and likely keeping an eye on your work chat. These are all applications, and that’s what we all truly care about, not the plumbing that delivers them.
The vast majority of corporate IT departments have a network monitoring solution. Typically that solution is built on standalone software platforms. If that’s you, this post is for you. You’re probably hearing a lot about “observability” these days. Generally, that’s the ability to answer any question and explore unknown or unexpected problems to deliver great digital experiences to your users.
