I’ve been updating some of our security documentation explaining what we do to ensure our product is suitable for the security models in regulated industries, such as finance and healthcare. Talking to our security guys, I was flabbergasted to find out that there are monitoring products out there that go against what is not only an industry best practice but also the right thing to do: agents that open and listen on fixed TCP ports!

In a network operations center (NOC), alerts originating from hundreds of servers, application monitoring systems, emails and ticketing services compete to catch a NOC analyst’s attention. NOCs face many challenges in parsing through alerts to identify actionable notifications and mobilize the right response team into action.

Today’s networks have evolved a long way since their early days and have become rather complicated systems that comprise numerous different network devices, protocols, and applications. Consequently, it is practically impossible to have a complete overview of what is happening in the network or whether everything in the network works as it should. Eventually, network problems will arise.

HAProxy 2.4 adds exciting features such as support for HTTP/2 WebSockets, authorization and routing of MQTT and FIX (Financial Information Exchange) protocol messages, DNS resolution over TCP, server timeouts that you can change on the fly, dynamic SSL certificate storage for client certificates sent to backend servers, and an improved cache; it adds a built-in OpenTracing integration, new Prometheus metrics, and circuit breaking improvements.

The question I am regularly asked is, “What use is OTN, when services are all IP, and routers handle connectivity directly across optical fiber connections, or wavelengths on optical fiber (IPoWDM)?”

In today’s technology-driven world, network automation tools have evolved from convenience to necessity in practically every IT field. Traditionally, IT managers would issue manual command lines to manage networks, but given the size of today’s business networks, manual workflows dealing with repetitive network tasks have become time-consuming and counterproductive, often at risk of incurring errors from manual implementation.

First, thanks for indulging the clickbait title joke. Serialization is the unsung hero of harmonizing network and application relations and deserves the occasional, snarky callout. Moreover, identifying how the unique mix of network clients in your environment consume your carefully manicured infrastructure is critical for managing network cost. Because today, a rapidly expanding, diverse pile of new technologies all assume the network is a magic grid, no tuning required.

There are few areas of networking so problematic, and at the same time so fixable, as network congestion. Understanding the common causes network congestion causes can help you detect them, fix them, and keep them from cropping up again. Network congestion is generally seen by the end-user as “network slow down”, or response times on our computer not being up to par.

The HAProxy Data Plane API 2.3 expands its service discovery mechanisms and introduces native support for discovering AWS EC2 instances and auto-scaling groups. It also adds a new configuration file that supports HCL and YAML, an Inotify configuration watcher, and Syslog support. HAProxy Data Plane API version 2.3 is now available and you will find it in the 2.3 version of the Alpine Docker image.

Bottlenecks and performance issues are the bane of network engineers everywhere. They can be hard to nail down, have a variety of different potential root causes, and give people an excuse to “blame the network”. Understanding network backplanes, backplane throughput, and concepts like blocking vs non-blocking switches, can help you better understand network design and troubleshoot bottlenecks when they come up.