For IT operations teams running modern networks, the work can be challenging and thankless. These teams don’t ever receive congratulatory messages from executives when a video conference operates flawlessly—they only hear complaints when those sessions are problematic.

It’s no secret that enterprise networks have grown more distributed and complex over the past few years. On top of this, conventional network monitoring tools are struggling to keep up with the rapid growth of IoT, new tech advancements, and intricate network architectures. A recent study by Enterprise Management Associates underscores this challenge, revealing that nearly 74% of IT organizations plan to replace their existing network management tools within the next two years.

The 2024 EMA Network Megatrends surveyed hundreds of IT professionals about their approach to managing, monitoring, and troubleshooting their networks. In this post, we examine the report’s findings to learn the business and technology trends shaping network operations strategy.

Link aggregation is a way of bundling a bunch of individual (Ethernet) links together so they act as a single logical link. A fundamental for effective switch management, if you have a switch with a whole lot of Gigabit Ethernet ports, you can connect all of them to another device that also has a bunch of ports and balance the traffic among these links to improve performance.

If you’ve ever been in charge of IP address assignment, you’ve come across the terms classful and classless addressing. If you haven’t, the main difference between classful and classless addressing is in the subnet length: classful addressing uses fixed-length subnet masks, but classless uses variable length subnet masks (VLSM).

Along with my colleague Jonathan Homa and Jimmy Yu of the Dell’Oro Group, I recently participated in a webinar in which we discussed the roles played by Coherent Routing and Optical Transport in supporting the rapidly increasing demands placed on the IP Optical middle mile network.

Is that a bird’s nest or is it spaghetti? Have you ever asked that question when looking into a IT wiring closet? At some point in your tenure as a network manager, you’ve likely been asked to inventory a network and create a network topology diagram.

For new networkers, Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) can be an intimidating topic. Many old-timers speak of spanning-tree in ominous tones, recounting the time when a “spanning-tree loop” brought down the network. Some managers strictly forbid anyone from changing anything related to the spanning tree, fearing a resulting service interruption. Some of the fear surrounding spanning trees is likely based on bad experiences, but some are based on ignorance—at least partly.