Communications are evolving at a dizzying pace, challenging service providers of all stripes to adopt the latest technologies and reshape their businesses for the new world. Telco Cloud, an area my team and I are deeply focused on, is one of the key components in making that transformation a success.

Many think they know what network bandwidth is but conflate performance with capacity. This blog, among other things, will end that confusion. And for true IT experts, we’ll dive deep into the whys and wherefores of network bandwidth monitoring and optimization.

Healthcare IT is simultaneously one of the most complex and sensitive networking systems there are. Aside from the wealth of confidential data they process and store, these networks must be highly available to support life-saving procedures and diagnostics programs. This makes proactive healthcare network monitoring—staying ahead of little issues before they become emergencies—an absolute necessity.

Network performance monitoring (NPM) and application performance monitoring (APM) are both key pillars of an overall performance and reliability management strategy, especially when dealing with complex, distributed infrastructure across cloud-native environments. NPM and APM also complement each other, in the sense that NPM can serve as an additional source of truth and observability for application performance.

NOC (Network Operations Center) is responsible for monitoring and managing the entire IT infrastructure 24/7. It manages servers, routers, firewalls, VPN gateways, switches and any devices used by an organization. The staff working at a NOC alerts the IT staff when it observes anything untoward or out of place with all this equipment. They perform routine maintenance tasks like updating software patches, rebooting systems and installing new firmware.

Kentik Synthetics is all about proactively testing and monitoring specific elements of your network, the services it relies on, and the applications it delivers. That means using artificial traffic instead of end-user traffic to test a variety of aspects of digital experience monitoring like device availability, DNS activity, web application page load times, and BGP activity. But to test an end-user’s experience interacting with a website, we need to approach things differently.