Rapidly increasing IT complexity, customer expectations around application availability and performance, and the importance of supporting new digital initiatives and services, taken together, are placing unprecedented demands on Network Operations Centers (NOCs) and IT Operations teams inside large, complex organizations like yours.

Remember the customer who reported a hard-coded packet per second (PPS) limit in AWS? His use case was a reverse-proxy server to a very active database cluster, complete with heartbeats, keep-alive connections, and a heavy load of queries and traffic. When the network throughput was sustained for an hour or so, the throughput would drop despite increasing demand.

A customer of ours reported a limit on number of packets in Amazon’s EC2 instances. According to the report, it didn’t happen on all instance types, and didn’t happen all the time. Also, it was unrelated entirely to bandwidth or MTU. According to the report, packet transmission rates were limited the same as CPU on t2/t3 instances — each instance earns credits which, when exhausted, cause throttling.

Network performance monitoring and diagnostics (commonly referred to as NPM or NPMD) tools are valuable for IT Ops teams that want to maintain visibility into the health and performance of their networking infrastructure. They provide this visibility in two major ways: by retrieving diagnostic data from network infrastructure components (such as routers and switches) and by analyzing network traffic flow and quality of service through various techniques (such as deep packet inspection).

AUSTIN, Texas — October 9, 2018 — Today at SpiceWorld 2018, Spiceworks announced a new cloud-based Spiceworks Inventory application that integrates with the cloud editions of Spiceworks Help Desk and Spiceworks Remote Support to help IT professionals more intuitively manage their technology assets and support end users from a single, easy-to-use ecosystem.

Today we welcome David Morris, a System Centre Engineer for one of the world's largest law firms, who has written a special guest blog about the Solarwinds community MP. A must read for anyone who has Solarwinds and Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM). We'd like to thank David for taking the time to write up this fantastic piece of content - it's another great example of the SCOM community hard at work.

“What kind of integrations do you have with PRTG?” Yesterday, one of our favourite German customers asked us that question. And today we post our answer in a blog post! And without further ado, we’ll let our technical colleague Tom Morriss take centre stage.