Being a network admin of an enterprise network, you know better than anyone how disastrous network downtimes might be. The cost of downtime study conducted by Gartner in 2014 found that network downtime costs $5,600 per minute on an average, but this number can range from $2,300 to $9,000 per minute. With organizations moving towards sophisticated networks built on hybrid infrastructures, network downtimes are becoming more frequent and costly.

Kubernetes has become the de facto standard for cloud-based applications. As companies migrate more and more workloads, ensuring reliable connectivity and performance are critical not just for user applications but also for the cluster itself. In this article, we will discuss how augmenting your system monitoring with in-cluster synthetic testing can give you proactive indicators that something might be headed for trouble.

In the first post of this series, I detailed ways companies considering cloud adoption can achieve quick wins in performance and cost savings. While these benefits of the cloud certainly remain true in theory, realizing these benefits in practice can be increasingly difficult as applications and their networks become more complex.