Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

When a critical system goes down, every second counts. That’s why IT and network professionals need to get comfortable with tracking incident response metrics like MTTR. MTTR (which you’ll soon come to find has several meanings) is a set of key metrics that measure how fast your team can repair and recover from incidents, directly impacting your system uptime and service quality.

Network monitoring continuously observes and manages the performance, availability, and security of a computer network to identify issues before they affect operations. As IT infrastructure grows more complex, network monitoring ensures your business stays online, whether dealing with on-premises or cloud environments. In hybrid or multi-cloud settings, having visibility across all systems is crucial to maintain seamless performance and prevent disruptions.

In this post, we dig into the impacts from Hurricane Helene which came ashore late last month wreaking destruction and severe flooding in the Southeastern United States. Using Kentik’s traffic data as well as Georgia Tech’s IODA, we detail the impacts in three of the hardest-hit states: Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina.

Network drops can seriously impact business operations, leading to lost productivity, communication breakdowns, and even financial losses. Whether you're managing critical systems, supporting remote teams, or delivering services to customers, a stable network is essential for maintaining business continuity. But what causes these network drops? How can you fix them? And most importantly, how can you prevent them from happening again?

The result of responses from over 300 digital business leaders in North America and EMEA across technology platform providers, financial services, retail, and other industries, our research showed that almost half the surveyed organizations are losing upward of $1M monthly in terms of total economic impact (TEI) due to outages and service degradations.

Network access control (NAC) is a critical component of any organization’s cybersecurity strategy. As companies adopt increasingly flexible work environments and emerging technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT), their networks have expanded rapidly. More users, devices, and access points mean more potential vulnerabilities that attackers could exploit. Implementing NAC solutions lets organizations stay securely connected despite relying on a complex, dynamic infrastructure.

In separate incidents this past month, I’ve helped clients troubleshoot network problems that turned out to be due to misconfigured switches. In all cases, the errors turned out to be things that I don’t think should ever have been changed from their default settings. So I thought it might be useful to have a brief discussion about how switches work and what features should or should not be used in normal office environments.