DigitalOcean is a cost-effective virtual private server (VPS) provider popular among the developer community. The platform also offers services for rapid development, deployment, testing, and maintaining modern distributed applications. One of these services is a managed firewall solution that allows blocking unwanted traffic. It’s relatively easy to manage and deploy as an infrastructure component. Sometimes, however, operations teams need to dig deeper when the firewall blocks network traffic.

When you’re in the networking technology field, you’re going to find that there are many different types of “monitors” (like router monitoring) that you need to stay on top of, from throughput to application performance and device health. And as you become more knowledgeable, you’re going to start to understand these diverse types of traffic and equipment. It’ll become more important to you to be able to understand concepts like where traffic is flowing.

For the first time, a software load balancer exceeds 2-million RPS on a single Arm instance. A few weeks ago, while I was working on an HAProxy issue related to thread locking contention, I found myself running some tests on a server with an 8-core, 16-thread Intel Xeon W2145 processor that we have in our lab. Although my intention wasn’t to benchmark the proxy, I observed HAProxy reach 1.03 million HTTP requests per second.

Your organization’s network is large, complicated, and constantly expanding. While you might think you have a handle on it, manually monitoring your network can lead to inaccuracies due to outdated data, undetected devices, and other common visibility issues. A network device discovery tool can help you find devices on a network to manage your device’s health, troubleshoot performance problems, and prepare for your network’s future.

A slow website or unreliable server caused by uptime issues within your network can drive away potential customers and could be costly and time-consuming to address if it happens repeatedly. A network uptime monitor will enable you to detect, diagnose, and aptly solve problems related to uptime while continuously observing your devices and automatically updating data visualizations.

With networks at the heart of the most modern business, network design can have a major impact on business outcomes. Finding the right balance of network performance, security, redundancy, and cost require a unique mix of project management and technical skill. To help you nail your next network design project, we’ll take a deep dive on the topic, provide a basic framework you can follow, and look at some best practices to keep in mind as you go.

With expectations around digital experience never higher, organizations should seriously consider implementing a network monitoring solution to support optimal business performance.

Auvik and Cherwell recently co-hosted an information-packed webinar to answer some important network integration questions facing network managers: How do we get ahead of our workload and how do we know where to start? Let’s look at some of the key takeaways from the webinar (you can watch here) on how to move from a proactive to a reactive network operation model, how network integration solutions can help put out fires faster, and when to incorporate tools to automate processes.