Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

In this SolarWinds TechPod episode, hosts Chrystal Taylor and Sean Sebring talk with Cheryl Nomanson, a SolarWinds Academy trainer with 14 years at the company. They discuss the importance of technical education for complex software and networks, exploring SolarWinds' comprehensive training offerings including the SolarWinds Academy with its on-demand courses, instructor-led virtual classes, and office hours format. Cheryl explains the SolarWinds Certified Professional (SCP) certification program and the newer SolarWinds Certified Instructor (SCI) program for training partners globally.

Checkly introduces ICMP monitoring to complement its existing uptime and synthetic monitoring (URL/HTTP, TCP, DNS, and heartbeat checks) for systems without HTTP endpoints, such as database hosts, VPN gateways, and load balancers.

"We pay less in transit IP costs today than we did when we turned up Kentik. Our cost per Mbps is lowered over the years — and our traffic is seven times what it was when we started." — Michael Leclaire, MetroNet.

Imperva Network Architect, Wallace Lee, shares how Kentik helps teams drill deeper than traditional reporting tools to improve network and customer experience. Wallace shares how, during a live architecture review, Imperva’s Kentik power users answered a critical “are we safe?” traffic question in seconds. Kentik enables engineers to instantly understand prefix-level bandwidth and shows exactly which ASN and ISP traffic came from. Wallace also highlights how Kentik makes Anycast traffic visibility an “easy win,” helping teams move from questions to confident decision-making fast.

Sorin Esanu, Director of Network Engineering at Race Communications, explains why deep, always-on network intelligence is essential when you have massive volumes of traffic moving in and out from many sources. After outgrowing an on-prem tool that required ongoing maintenance and didn’t deliver the analytics they needed, Race chose Kentik for richer visibility, daily traffic optimization, and improved security.

Everett Sinclair, Network Administrator at Conway Corporation, explains why Kentik became their “one pane of glass” for cloud-based network visibility, rapid troubleshooting, and smarter peering and caching decisions. With Kentik’s SaaS network intelligence platform, Conway gets updates automatically, avoids server rebuilds, and can deploy cloud agents remotely to run simple metric tests close to customer locations.