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

Context is Key: Additive vs. Subtractive Topology

Understanding the context of an IT incident can greatly reduce the MTTR and enhance the ability to determine the root cause. In an IT environment, ‘context’ is used to refer to the subset of information necessary to troubleshoot and diagnose an incident, or event. For some scenarios, the context may be the downstream dependencies after a high availability pair of firewalls goes offline, and in others, it may be the datastore in contention from multiple VMs.

To VPC or not to VPC? Pros and Cons in AWS Lambda

When you’re working with EC2 or containers, VPCs have long been viewed as a must-have. Without them, you will face a constant barrage of attacks aimed at your infrastructure and OS, such as brute force login attacks. But are VPCs still needed when it comes to AWS Lambda? What do you actually get when you put a function inside a VPC? And what are the downsides?

Understanding Istio Ingress

Istio is a hot technology right now. Giants such as Google and IBM have devoted entire teams of engineers to the project to push it to production readiness. Since 1.0 has been released recently, I wanted to write down some of the things that confused me coming from a strictly Kubernetes only world where we have Ingress controllers and Service load balancers and how Istio takes these same concepts but on stimulants.

IPAM. What is it? The major breakthrough of Pandora FMS Release 731

Today we will take a tour of the most technical Pandora FMS. For some people, it can be a challenge. Although the IPAM extension already existed in Pandora FMS world, in release 731 this extension was improved to the point of being considered as a new extension. But what is IPAM? What is IPAM? and what is it for?…. In this article we will answer these important questions to be able to use it.

Next Time You Configure or Update Your Network Interfaces Use This Checklist

Interfaces, commonly known as ports, are a vital component of any network. Need to connect two pieces of equipment? It could be as easy as plugging in cables—but then you’re using out of the box configurations that don’t follow best practices and are inherently insecure.

Comparing kube-proxy modes: iptables or IPVS?

kube-proxy is a key component of any Kubernetes deployment. Its role is to load-balance traffic that is destined for services (via cluster IPs and node ports) to the correct backend pods. Kube-proxy can run in one of three modes, each implemented with different data plane technologies: userspace, iptables, or IPVS. The userspace mode is very old, slow, and definitely not recommended! But how should you weigh up whether to go with iptables or IPVS mode?

ML and AI enabled IT Ops: the NOC as a modern cockpit

A common sentiment among our prospects after they see our demo for the first time is: “That’s it? It can’t be that simple!”. The truth is – yes it can be, and it should be. ML and AI should make IT Ops simpler, and a big part of that is usability. If your ML & AI powered IT Ops tools take months to set up and weeks to learn, and then don’t provide a substantially improved user experience, you’re obviously using the wrong tools.

Use Case #9: Troubleshooting Network Performance Issues

One of the most frustrating service calls you’ll receive is from a client experiencing a network performance issue. The issue could be caused by any number of different things and typically would require you jumping into your car and driving to the client site. The hours drag on while you manually trace wires and test ports to troubleshoot the issue. The longer it takes you to figure it out, the longer you’re interrupting your client’s business.