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Networks

The latest News and Information on IT Networks and related technologies.

Packet Loss Testing and Reducing Guide + Recommended Tools

If you’ve ever encountered a slow file download or a frozen/lagging video, you’ve experienced packet loss. Under certain circumstances, these might be minor inconveniences, but packet loss on a larger scale can be financially detrimental to businesses. Fortunately, there are steps you can take to diagnose and reduce packet loss. In this article, we provide some background on why packet loss occurs before sharing five of the best network monitoring solutions on the market to combat the issue.

Understanding Load Balancing Essentials

In this post we’ll review some of the essential ideas in Load Balancing to help you understand how to get the best configuration for your application. Load balancing is an essential part of any application deployment to provide high availability, performance and security. We’ll focus on understanding and selecting scheduling and persistence algorithms and using the new LoadMaster Network Telemetry feature to validate the results.

Turn your home office into a NOC room with Philips Hue and Grafana

I recently got a couple of Philips Hue Play lights to spice up my home office setup, and after a bit of tinkering with the APIs, I decided it would be a fun project to create my own personal NOC room, using them to visualize the status of some system I’m monitoring.

The What and The Why of TLS Inspection

Connecting to nearly any web page today, you’re more often to see a URL that begins with “https://” instead of “http://”. Wondered what the “S” is for? It stands for “secure”, but more importantly, it identifies that the connection is taking place over a secure channel using the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol. But what is TLS, and beyond that, what’s a TLS inspection?

Building a complete network security checklist

Understanding what to audit in a network can be chaotic and confusing. Building a complete network security checklist is crucial for organizations with computers connected to the internet or to each other. Think of it like an antivirus scan you might run on your computer to find Trojans or malware, except you’re scanning your entire network to find anything that may cripple it.

Understanding The Move To Intelligent Networking

More CIOs are seeing the value of network automation, which can improve network efficiency and cost, as well as help them manage increasingly complex IT environments. But like the adoption of any new technology, network automation presents a number of challenges and considerations for CIOs. In our recent webinar, PCCW Global’s CTO Paul Gampe and VP of Development and Operations Jay Turner shared some tips and insights into how to begin the move to intelligent networking…

Visualize HAProxy Metrics with InfluxDB

HAProxy generates over a hundred metrics to give you a nearly real-time view of the state of your load balancers and the services they proxy, but to get the most from this data, you need a way to visualize it. InfluxData’s InfluxDB suite of applications takes the many discrete data points that make up HAProxy metrics and turns them into time-series data, which is then collected and graphed, giving you insight into the workings of your systems and services.

How to Manage Network Configurations + Best Software to Automate Configuration Management

Businesses both small and large require agility in how they handle device firmware and network configurations. For large networks especially, manual monitoring and change implementation can be inefficient. As such, more and more IT departments turn to automated network configuration management tools with bulk change capabilities.