Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Reduce downtime and build a more resilient network with our practical tips for improving network availability. By Serena Toh and Matt Madawi Table of Contents Network availability is more than a technical metric (though it is an important one). The availability of your network is the difference between applications that keep serving customers and applications that stall when a link, device, data center, or provider fails.

For many organizations, modernizing their VMs before migrating them is not a realistic option, especially when external events trigger the migration. Mapping dependencies and refactoring network configurations before the deadline is impractical, forcing VMs to move as they are. The mechanics of moving a VM are largely solved.

The NAS Died. My WhatsUp Gold Server Died With It. WhatsUp Gold 360 Still Alerted Me. A real home-lab failure shows why always-on external monitoring and cloud-originated notifications matter when the local monitoring stack becomes part of the outage. On April 13, 2025, the NAS providing NFS storage to several virtual machines in my Proxmox lab locked up and halted.

Your enterprise network is more distributed, diverse, and complex than ever before. Your campus, WAN, data center, and SD-WAN environments span multiple technologies and vendors. Now more than ever, the complex relationships between devices, interfaces, and network layers are critical to your day-to-day operations. When an issue arises, knowing that something is wrong is only the beginning.

A firewall running low on memory rarely fails all at once. It degrades first. Connections drop intermittently, policies take longer to process, and by the time the device becomes unresponsive, the problem has been building for days or weeks. This article walks through what firewall memory usage actually means, what causes it to climb, how to spot the symptoms early, and how to troubleshoot and fix it before it takes your network down with it.