Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

A significant portion of companies have vulnerabilities in their network management practices. These vulnerabilities include a lack of network visibility, configuration backups, proactive network planning, and up-to-date documentation. Despite these vulnerabilities, the majority of IT pros report high confidence in their networks, indicating a potential mismatch between perception and reality.

If this past year has proven anything, it’s that making long-term predictions can be a challenge. After all, who would have predicted a large portion of the workforce would be fully remote and we’d be staying six feet away from each other in grocery stores for most of the year? Even though a curveball like COVID-19 could happen at any time, it doesn’t mean we should completely stop forecasting what things will look like in IT and beyond over the coming months.

First off, I’m going to make an assumption: I’m going to assume you—like me—have spent a lot more time online in 2020 than you ever have before. Thanks to COVID-19, we were all at home with nowhere to go. Many people started working full-time from home, and kids were out of school for months as springtime lockdowns extended into summer holidays.

As a network admin or a network manager, you’re likely using a ton of software and tools—from network monitoring tools like Auvik to ITSMs like ServiceNow to communications apps like Microsoft Teams. With a lot of tools comes a lot of data, which can show you how your network and your team are performing over a period of time. The challenge is putting all of those pieces together to see the bigger picture.

In the inaugural Network Vendor Diversity report, Auvik discovered high diversity in the network devices IT teams and MSPs were managing. In 2019, the data showed complexity continuing to rise as all categories became increasingly fragmented. In the 2020 edition, we look at the same four categories of managed network devices—access points, switches, routers, and firewalls—deployed across a sample of 30,000 networks, and compared the data to both 2018 and 2019.

There are two important protocols required to get your network to forward multicast packets: IGMP and PIM. In this article, I’ll show you how to set up these protocols on your network and how to troubleshoot them. PIM (Protocol Independent Multicast) has two main versions called “dense-mode” and “sparse-mode.” There is also a “sparse-dense-mode,” which has features of both versions and is really just used to help to bootstrap a multicast network.

The cloud is here—and so are its acronyms. Since software as a service (SaaS) hit the world in 2001, the ‘as a service’ model has been extended to just about everything you can think of. Along the way, the definition has become a little muddied. It used to be that -aaS meant something delivered on a subscription basis via the cloud, without a physical component.

For many companies, the beginning of October is also the beginning of the fourth and final quarter of the fiscal year. In IT, it’s a time to prepare for the new year by defining our priorities and setting our budget. COVID-19 threw a wrench into all of our 2020 plans from last year and a lot has changed since then. But one thing that hasn’t changed is the need for a network monitoring system in your software stack.

Multicast networking is based on the simple concept that a single packet can be sent by a server and it will be received by many receivers. Multicast is different from broadcast because it’s more selective. Where broadcast packets are received by all receivers in a particular network segment (or broadcast domain), multicast packets are received only by receivers that want them. Also, multicast receivers can be distributed throughout a larger network behind routers.

When something goes wrong in your network, you often don’t find out about it until your users are affected. By then, you’re on the receiving end of an angry phone call and you’re left scrambling to identify the issue and understand its root cause. As soon as you hang up (if the affected user even lets you hang up), you’re in a race against the clock.