Healthcare SysAdmins haven’t just taken the concept of digital transformation to heart—they’re one of its largest proponents. Quality care improves patient outcomes, so healthcare organizations have embraced the idea of highly connected and digitally enhanced environments to help deliver that care. But while healthcare might often be at the forefront of the digital transformation and tech adoption wave, that doesn’t mean the process isn’t fraught with challenges.

The end-goal for a CIO adopting a Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) approach is to create a predictable, cloud-like consumption model for enterprise infrastructure. NaaS is designed to ensure that the enterprise network is state of the art and continually adopts innovations, frees the enterprise IT staff from monitoring tasks, rolls up the range of SLAs, and reduces the need for specialist skills in-house.

Load balancing means splitting up network traffic so that you can distribute it evenly across a group of backend servers. For example, if you run two web servers, both hosting a copy of the same website, then you can balance the traffic across them, sending half to one and half to the other. The goal of load balancing is to increase the availability of your website or web-based application by routing a portion of requests to each server.

In the first podcast episode of 2022, Avi welcomes Ron Winward to Network AF! Ron is the vice president of network services at INAP, global provider of secure, performance-oriented, hybrid infrastructure. Like Avi, Ron also grew up in Pennsylvania and is a member of the East Coast Access of Infrastructure.

Today, I’m excited to announce that Gerald Combs, the original creator and lead maintainer of Wireshark, has joined Sysdig. In addition, Sysdig is becoming the primary sponsor of Wireshark.

A commonly used tool at the Cisco command line is the access control list (ACL). At their simplest, access control lists are collections of IP addresses that are used by a router, switch, or a firewall to identify network traffic that must be handled in a special way. Cisco and other network vendors use ACLs for many different purposes. This article focuses on IOS access control lists as used on Cisco routers, although much of this discussion applies to Cisco switches as well.

Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is a networking protocol that aids in the transfer of data among devices, thereby managing and monitoring devices present in the internet protocol network. Networks have an array of devices connected to them, and new devices get introduced to them as trends in technology evolve. These new devices are often used to simplify complex processes but end up complicating simple networks.

When we talk about observability, we tend to focus first and foremost on the metrics, logs, and traces that you can collect from applications – such as request rates, error rates, and request duration. Infrastructure-level metrics, like CPU and memory utilization, might factor into the discussion as well. Here’s a third category of critical observability insights that teams tend to overlook: the network.