Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Let me start by saying that spanning tree is a Good Thing. It saves you from loops, which will completely shut down a network. But it has to be configured properly to work properly. I can’t count the number of times I’ve had a client call me, desperate with a terribly broken network, and I’ve responded, “Sounds like a spanning tree problem.” There are many ways things can go wrong with spanning tree. In this article, I’ve collected six of the recurring themes.

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.

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.

The TCP/IP protocol sometimes shows its age. It was invented in an era when networks were very slow and packet loss was high. So one of the main considerations in early protocol design was reliability. The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) has built-in mechanisms for reliability that include validating a checksum on every packet, as well as detection and retransmission of dropped or out-of-order packets.

In May I mostly took the time to plan out the rest of the year, as well as one big feature to make OnlineOrNot's incident management more realistic.

Today, network operations teams encounter significant hurdles due to shortages of skilled personnel and fragmented toolsets. Despite consolidation efforts, it's common for teams to manage up to 15 different monitoring products. Research suggests that network professionals believe they could potentially resolve 53% of network issues by implementing improved network management tools.

I’ve been a user of Grafana OSS for seven years, starting with Grafana 5.0. My, how things have evolved since then. The first time I used Grafana was to monitor a Kafka data pipeline with a bunch of Java Spring Boot microservices and Prometheus to extract metrics. I was amazed how much you could do with Grafana and Prometheus together, and so I always kept Grafana on my short list of places I wanted to put my energy, either as a contributor or by working directly for the company.

In the past few years we’ve been witnessing tectonic shifts in the open source realm, with established projects taken off open source or otherwise turning to the dark side. On the other hand, we’ve seen active forks aiming to keep these projects open gaining momentum. What does it mean for the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) movement? Is this a trend or just a passing wave? What can we learn from it as vendors and as a community?

With the increasing technology demand in the business sector, IT facilities play a critical role in running business activities in modern society. Whether it is mobile apps or high-end networks, everything has become a cornerstone for business success. Thus, it is important to acknowledge that no matter how advanced IT systems and applications are, they can always face some problems or failures. However, one cannot mistake an IT service desk for an IT help desk software or IT service management (ITSM).

Utilizing real-user metrics from your applications frontend can provide a significant advantage to your company. Real user metrics offer insights into how users interact with your product or service. By monitoring metrics like page load times, response times, and overall performance, you can highlight areas where users could be experiencing frustration or encountering problems. This information can then be utilized to make targeted improvements to enhance the user experience.