The vast majority of corporate IT departments have a network monitoring solution. Typically that solution is built on standalone software platforms. If that’s you, this post is for you. You’re probably hearing a lot about “observability” these days. Generally, that’s the ability to answer any question and explore unknown or unexpected problems to deliver great digital experiences to your users.

Network monitoring is a vital part of your security architecture and layered security portfolio. Step one in your network monitoring safety checklist is making sure you have network monitoring in the first place. The rest of our steps assume you have network monitoring and lay out five ways to optimize its value.

Roughly 47.4 million people quit their jobs and left the workforce last year in search of better ones, leading to what we now call the Great Resignation. Then, as the economy re-opened and companies intensified hiring efforts, millions of people switched careers, searching for better working conditions and higher salaries. Experts say the trend will continue as the Gen Z population reshapes the labor market.

In the previous “Flowmon and WhatsUp Gold: Discover application experience issues through single pane of glass” blog post we have demonstrated how IT Infrastructure Monitoring (WhatsUp Gold) and Network Performance Monitoring & Diagnostics (Flowmon) work seamlessly together to report on application performance, user experience and infrastructure status.

Despite everyone’s best efforts, network failures happen. And when downtime means lost productivity, fast troubleshooting becomes an integral part of IT operations. So with the addition of OID (object identifier) monitoring history, Auvik providing users an archive for troubleshooting, analysis, and planning. When it comes to managing network issues, diagnosing the root cause is the first step. And often, there’s a gap between when an incident occurs, and when it’s reported.

Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) is a routing security framework that provides a mechanism for validating the correct originating autonomous system (AS) and prefix length of a BGP route. Route Origin Authorization (ROA) is a cryptographically signed object within the RPKI that asserts the correct originating AS and prefix length of a BGP route. For as long as the internet has existed, the challenge of securing its underlying protocols has persisted.

You know by now that hackers literally never sleep. Chances are your network has been hit before and absolutely will be hit again. Hackers invent new techniques every day and tweak existing ones, many of which are automated—which is why we can say that hackers literally never sleep. Hackers either attack your network directly or attack your infrastructure through your network. Either way, the network itself is your first line of defense.

Organisations in the banking, insurance, and financial services sectors have been slower than others in moving to the cloud due to concerns over security, data residency, and privacy. For more traditional financial institutions, there is also the not insignificant consideration that their core banking systems are running on decades old on-prem architecture that is just not possible to shift to the public cloud. Nevertheless, adoption of the cloud in banking and finance is happening.

In the old days, it took a bunch of help desk tickets for an engineer to realize there was something wrong with the network. At that time, troubleshooting meant logging into network devices one-by-one to pore over logs. In the late 80s, SNMP was introduced giving engineers a way to manage network devices remotely. It quickly became a way to also collect and manage information about devices. That was a big step forward, and it marked the beginning of network visibility as we know it today.