Load balancers play an important role in distributed computing. With load balancers, you can distribute heavy work loads across multiple resources, which allows you to scale horizontally. Since they are placed prior to computing resources, they need to endure heavy traffic and allocate it to the right resources fast. For this to happen, monitoring the health and performance of load balancers is key. In monitoring, visualization helps users to view various metrics quickly.

In monitoring, a target system or device is a deciding factor in designing your monitoring stack. You will have to consider various aspects starting from how you want to collect data in what frequency to how you want to surface metrics to end users. You will have to take this strategic approach when you want to monitor your network infrastructure. In this article, we will discuss how Grafana, an open-source visualization tool, can help you to monitor network switches.

Network monitoring is the practice of making sure the network as a whole, functions optimally by keeping a watch over all endpoints of a network, which is the heart of any business’s routine functioning. Any discrepancy in the form of a breach or slowdown could prove costly. Proactively monitoring networks helps administrators identify and prevent any potential issues that could occur at any time.

As complexity of systems and applications continue to evolve and change, the number of metrics that need to be monitored grows in parallel. Whether you’re on a DevOps team, an SRE, or a developer building the code yourself, many of these components may be fragmented across your infrastructure, making it increasingly difficult to identify the root cause when experiencing downtime or abnormal behavior.

IPv4 and IPv6 are the two versions of IP. IPv4 was first released in 1983 and is currently widely used as an IP address for a variety of systems. It aids in the identification of systems in a network through the use of an address. The 32-bit address, which may store multiple addresses, is employed. Despite this, it is the most widely used internet protocol, controlling the vast bulk of internet traffic. IPv6 was created in 1994 and is referred to as the "next generation" protocol.