Healthcare IT is simultaneously one of the most complex and sensitive networking systems there are. Aside from the wealth of confidential data they process and store, these networks must be highly available to support life-saving procedures and diagnostics programs. This makes proactive healthcare network monitoring—staying ahead of little issues before they become emergencies—an absolute necessity.

Network performance monitoring (NPM) and application performance monitoring (APM) are both key pillars of an overall performance and reliability management strategy, especially when dealing with complex, distributed infrastructure across cloud-native environments. NPM and APM also complement each other, in the sense that NPM can serve as an additional source of truth and observability for application performance.

NOC (Network Operations Center) is responsible for monitoring and managing the entire IT infrastructure 24/7. It manages servers, routers, firewalls, VPN gateways, switches and any devices used by an organization. The staff working at a NOC alerts the IT staff when it observes anything untoward or out of place with all this equipment. They perform routine maintenance tasks like updating software patches, rebooting systems and installing new firmware.

Kentik Synthetics is all about proactively testing and monitoring specific elements of your network, the services it relies on, and the applications it delivers. That means using artificial traffic instead of end-user traffic to test a variety of aspects of digital experience monitoring like device availability, DNS activity, web application page load times, and BGP activity. But to test an end-user’s experience interacting with a website, we need to approach things differently.

When it comes to multi-cloud, it’s easy to assume that the biggest connectivity challenge facing network professionals would be connecting between different cloud providers. But actually moving data between different geographic instances of the same cloud platform is not as straightforward as you might think.

VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) aren’t new. They’ve been around for almost three decades and are used by practically every organization and individual who pays attention to data privacy. But the kind of benefit every user derives from a VPN may differ. While some may use it simply to protect their confidential data when browsing the internet, others may use it to escape data throttling. After all, a VPN can help you break the bandwidth barriers your ISP imposes on you.

Network redundancy is process of providing multiple paths for traffic, so that data can keep flowing even in the event of a failure. Put simply: more redundancy equals more reliability. It also helps with distributed site management. The idea is that if one device fails, another can automatically take over. By adding a little bit of complexity, we reduce the probability that a failure will take the network down. But complexity is also an enemy to reliability.

The Transmission Control Protocol provides reliable, ordered and, sometimes, time-sensitive data flow between applications across a network. As well as economizes network use by attempting to improve error-handling capability and providing reliable data transmission. The Transmission Control Protocol is the underlying communication protocol for a wide variety of applications, including web servers and websites, email applications, FTP and peer-to-peer apps.

This post is part of a series featuring customers, partners, and experienced DX Unified Infrastructure Management (DX UIM) practitioners. We’ve asked these expert users to share their knowledge with the broader DX UIM community. Today, we’re featuring Kathy Solomon, the Unix Systems Administrator for the R&D Support organization within Broadcom IT.