Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

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.

Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) is a routing security framework that provides a mechanism for validating the correct originating autonomous system (AS) and prefix length of a BGP route. Route Origin Authorization (ROA) is a cryptographically signed object within the RPKI that asserts the correct originating AS and prefix length of a BGP route. For as long as the internet has existed, the challenge of securing its underlying protocols has persisted.

In the old days, it took a bunch of help desk tickets for an engineer to realize there was something wrong with the network. At that time, troubleshooting meant logging into network devices one-by-one to pore over logs. In the late 80s, SNMP was introduced giving engineers a way to manage network devices remotely. It quickly became a way to also collect and manage information about devices. That was a big step forward, and it marked the beginning of network visibility as we know it today.

The rolling thunder of cybersecurity warnings has built to a crescendo this year. According to HelpNetSecurity, cybercriminals launched over 9.75 million DDoS attacks in 2022. The Cloudflare Attack Trends 2022 Q1 Report published yesterday shows an alarming increase in application-layer DDoS attacks. And our own Doug Madory has been sharing analysis on the impact of cyberattacks, too.

In this episode of the Network AF podcast, Avi Freedman connects with Ilissa Miller, network whisperer and PR industry veteran. Ilissa and her team translate technology into business terms by helping clients understand the value and functionality of a company. Avi asks Ilissa how she got into the field, her biggest takeaways that helped launch her own business and what’s important in today’s networking world.