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The latest News and Information on IT Networks and related technologies.

Virtualizing a Network Operations Center

A Network Operations Center (NOC) is a location from which IT support technicians can supervise, monitor, and maintain client networks and infrastructure. Because they act as a central nervous system for many organizations, NOCs are typically located in a central physical location. The global coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic is an unprecedented situation that is creating new challenges for everyone—and that includes NOCs.

Top 10 Reasons Why NMS is A Must Have

Nothing’s worse than getting a call from the users that the network is down. Too often, IT lacks the visibility they need to get before performance issues arise, meaning you’re in the dark until a user or customer calls to complain. Once an outage happens, the clock is ticking. And the more time you take to understand and resolve the issue, the more it costs you: in terms of customer dissatisfaction, and also staff time & lost productivity.

4 Ways to align your Service Desk to business operations

As an IT leader, it’s important to step back, sometimes, and view what you can do better with your service desk. Because small issues and inefficiencies can easily add up to day-to-day chaos. In organizations where IT services are aligned with business objectives, they are more likely to make investments in new technologies like AI & ML. Periodic reviews will make sure that the alignment stays. Here we are going to look at some areas where putting efforts can yield significant result.

An Introduction to Web Proxies

Web proxies intercept traffic from your systems as they move to other systems, analyze the packets, then send the data along. There are a lot of reasons why you might want to intercept packets. Originally the main use case for a proxy was as a caching server. In this use case, the first time a person in your network goes to a website, the static content (particularly graphic images) gets downloaded and cached. Then, because the content is local, the next person to hit that site will get a fast response.

What is network scanning? How to do it?

The work of an admin or network administrator may seem ordinary, that type of work that just follows a guide, but right now, you could not be further from truth. Here I bring you network scanning, a task that could take a lot of your time… or little, if you have Pandora FMS by your side and with the help of one of those free software applications included in GNU / Linux. Let’s take a look!

Amazon VPC Traffic Mirroring

The first means to collect security-relevant information at Cloud SIEM Enterprise (CSE) was our Network Sensor. It was built to analyze network traffic and provide visibility beyond traditional SIEM's down to the network-level. Beyond organizing packets into flows, the sensor supports more advanced features such as decoding of common protocols, file carving, SSL certificate validation, OS fingerprinting, clustered deployment and more.

How Well Do You Know the Orion Platform? Tips, Tricks, and How-Tos - SolarWinds Lab Episode #85

How much do you really know about the Orion® Platform? Regardless of your level of expertise, even the most seasoned user will learn a thing or two in this episode. We'll go through dashboards, customizations, features, functions, you name it. Learn from SolarWinds® Orion Platform experts, ask them questions, and share your own pro tips during live chat and Q&A.

HAProxyConf 2019 - From 1.5 into the Future by Christian Platzer

At Willhaben, we run Austria’s largest classified advertising marketplace. We started using HAProxy due to our need to move to an all-HTTPS environment. Since then, we’ve leveraged HAProxy for geo-redundancy, HTTP/2, integration with Kubernetes, and blocking suspicious activity. In this talk, I will explain how we gradually shifted from basic HAProxy functionality to our current deployment, and will also describe where we encountered trouble in our production environment and how we overcame it. We are currently serving 5-6 gigabits per second of peak traffic via HAProxy, with about 20k requests per second.

HAProxyConf 2019 - Fully-Automated Deployment of Anycasted Load Balancers with HAProxy and Python

Keeping your service configuration aligned over hundreds of hosts is never a simple task. This talk will illustrate how the University of Paderborn automated the integration of HAProxy into our infrastructure. As our current generation of load balancer appliances approached the end of life and we thought about improving how we managed our services, our goal was clear: we needed a scalable, consistent, active-active setup of load balancers that could be easily automated with open-source tools. We achieve scalability with Anycast but needed to make sure the configurations could keep up with application changes.