One of the most frustrating service calls you’ll receive is from a client experiencing a network performance issue. The issue could be caused by any number of different things and typically would require you jumping into your car and driving to the client site. The hours drag on while you manually trace wires and test ports to troubleshoot the issue. The longer it takes you to figure it out, the longer you’re interrupting your client’s business.

I’ve just finished getting through security at O’Hare—what an adventure! There were crowds at the check-in, a long security line (luckily I had TSA pre-check), and what seemed like 500 gates I had to pass to get to my gate at the far end of the terminal. We all understand why there are security checkpoints at the airport. They ensure that only those people who belong at the gate are at the gate, and also that there are no malicious actors on airplanes. But why are there so many gates?

Network monitoring at scale is an age-old problem in IT. In this post, I’ll discuss a brief history of network monitoring tools — including the pain points of legacy technology when it came to monitoring thousands of devices — and share my modern-day solution using Sensu Go and Ansible.

The one complaint that an IT administrator dreads to receive is one where an end user says, “My application is slow!”. The application in question can be a web application, an enterprise application like SAP, Microsoft SharePoint, or a SaaS application like Salesforce or Office 365. Since the application is accessed over a network, it’s natural that the network team is pulled up first under the suspicion that it’s a network issue.

Software as a Service (SaaS) is a mainstream way of bringing enterprise applications to hundreds of thousands of application users at a stable cost. Rather than loading client software on a desktop PC, we lease software from the cloud, and monitor how the SaaS application is delivered. That makes it available to everyone in the enterprise.

It would be ideal if every network device you managed across all your client sites was from the same manufacturer, but for most MSPs that’s not the case—over 75% of MSPs manage four or more network vendors for their clients, and some manage upwards of 20. Even though taking care of diverse networks is standard procedure for most service providers, managing gear from multiple vendors is still, well, complex. It means handling different operating systems, different languages, and more.

Calico is a popular CNI plugin for Kubernetes. It leverages Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) for communicating routes available on nodes. This method fosters a highly scalable networking model between our workloads.

Since load balancers are active devices that can be included in the design of a WAN, the question arises: Should we adapt our monitoring scheme to include something that could be called Load Balancer Monitoring? To answer this question we can assume that WAN monitoring is based on the following fact: the behaviour of communication links directly affects the performance of applications and therefore the entire platform.

To fully understand what NetFlow is and why it’s used for network monitoring, we first need to know what a flow is. When computers need to talk to one another they establish communication channels, commonly referred to as connections. (Technically speaking, these communication channels can only be called connections when the TCP protocol is involved.) A flow refers to any connection or connection-like communication channel.

Although since 1985 the federal government of the United States of America provided the radio bands (frequencies) to be used for our daily use, it was not until 1999 when the brand Wi-Fi® was registered, which means wireless fidelity and in that same year was founded the WECA (Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance).