Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

An on-site switch plays a critical role in a network: that of connecting your users to the rest of the IT infrastructure. Don’t think of that jack in the wall or under the cubicle as a simple Ethernet port. As part of effective switch management, you need to think of it as the mission-critical gateway to IT services that it is.

In any given network, switches, routers, and firewalls may support different flow protocols. After all, there’s NetFlow, sFlow, IPFIX, and J-Flow, to name a few. With so many options, you may be wondering “Which flow protocol should I use?” It’s a common question, and it has a relatively simple answer: While some devices support multiple protocols, a device typically only supports one type of flow protocol, so you should use the protocol your device and collector supports.

An IT director and an MSP walk into a bar… Well, it wasn’t actually a bar, it was a panel session on the second day of the Protect & Streamline Summit for IT Leaders. And they didn’t so much walk in as hit join meeting from their respective home offices. Nevertheless, the discussion between Bryan Schultz and Bob Coppedge, moderated by Datto’s Rob Rae, felt a lot like a candid conversation between friends.

Cybersecurity has always been an evolving challenge for IT teams—even before the pandemic and subsequent mass exodus to the home office. At the Protect & Streamline Summit for IT Leaders, experts from the IT and cybersecurity space came together to share advice for IT leaders scrambling to contend with a new set of business risks. Read on for key takeaways or access all session recordings for a deeper dive.

A few years ago I wrote a blog article about the zero-trust network security model and why I thought it was something every organization should be thinking about implementing. While I still believe that to be true—probably more true than ever, in fact—the landscape since then has changed a great deal, particularly because of the increase in cloud-based services, and zero-trust is now an extremely achievable goal.

In today’s world, it isn’t always practical or possible to be on site to troubleshoot every network issue that pops up. Whether you’re under mandatory stay-at-home orders because of a global pandemic, in the middle of a surprise snowstorm, or sleeping cozy in your bed 60 miles away, being able to access remotely the network would make your life infinitely easier. With Auvik’s remote management features, it’s possible.

When you work in IT, there’s never a shortage of things to do. For folks who like to be busy, IT is a great place to be. But the workload can quickly become overwhelming, and it may often feel like you and your team are putting out fires and not productively working on other tasks that move the needle for your team or company. The trick is managing your team’s time effectively so the excessive pile of work gets done. These four time management strategies can help. Let’s get started.

Let’s be honest: As a network manager, you’re responsible for knowing a little bit about everything when it comes to computer networking. From fundamentals to anticipating future tech changes, there’s a lot of ground to cover. To keep up, you need to keep learning. If you’re wondering where to start, this list of 10 computer networking books can help.

In my previous article, I explained what syslog is and why it’s used. In this article, I’m digging into how to configure syslog on network devices. The explanations and examples will be a bit Cisco specific, mainly because that’s the gear I’m most familiar with. Essentially every modern network device has at least some syslog capabilities, though.