One of the most frustrating service calls you’ll receive is from a client experiencing a network performance issue. The issue could be caused by any number of different things and typically would require you jumping into your car and driving to the client site. The hours drag on while you manually trace wires and test ports to troubleshoot the issue. The longer it takes you to figure it out, the longer you’re interrupting your client’s business.

I’ve just finished getting through security at O’Hare—what an adventure! There were crowds at the check-in, a long security line (luckily I had TSA pre-check), and what seemed like 500 gates I had to pass to get to my gate at the far end of the terminal. We all understand why there are security checkpoints at the airport. They ensure that only those people who belong at the gate are at the gate, and also that there are no malicious actors on airplanes. But why are there so many gates?

Network monitoring at scale is an age-old problem in IT. In this post, I’ll discuss a brief history of network monitoring tools — including the pain points of legacy technology when it came to monitoring thousands of devices — and share my modern-day solution using Sensu Go and Ansible.

The one complaint that an IT administrator dreads to receive is one where an end user says, “My application is slow!”. The application in question can be a web application, an enterprise application like SAP, Microsoft SharePoint, or a SaaS application like Salesforce or Office 365. Since the application is accessed over a network, it’s natural that the network team is pulled up first under the suspicion that it’s a network issue.

Software as a Service (SaaS) is a mainstream way of bringing enterprise applications to hundreds of thousands of application users at a stable cost. Rather than loading client software on a desktop PC, we lease software from the cloud, and monitor how the SaaS application is delivered. That makes it available to everyone in the enterprise.