Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

ARP (Address Resolution Protocol) is the protocol that bridges Layer 2 and Layer 3 of the OSI model, which in the typical TCP/IP stack is effectively gluing together the Ethernet and Internet Protocol layers. This critical function allows for the discovery of a devices’ MAC (media access control) address based on its known IP address. By extension, an ARP table is simply the method for storing the information discovered through ARP.

Your network relies on reliable data transmission. Not only could troublesome connections yield negative results for customers, but connectivity issues could also indicate deeper problems within your network. However, if you monitor your bandwidth consistently and carefully, you can maintain your network’s health and solve issues as they arise.

DigitalOcean is a cost-effective virtual private server (VPS) provider popular among the developer community. The platform also offers services for rapid development, deployment, testing, and maintaining modern distributed applications. One of these services is a managed firewall solution that allows blocking unwanted traffic. It’s relatively easy to manage and deploy as an infrastructure component. Sometimes, however, operations teams need to dig deeper when the firewall blocks network traffic.

When you’re in the networking technology field, you’re going to find that there are many different types of “monitors” (like router monitoring) that you need to stay on top of, from throughput to application performance and device health. And as you become more knowledgeable, you’re going to start to understand these diverse types of traffic and equipment. It’ll become more important to you to be able to understand concepts like where traffic is flowing.

Your organization’s network is large, complicated, and constantly expanding. While you might think you have a handle on it, manually monitoring your network can lead to inaccuracies due to outdated data, undetected devices, and other common visibility issues. A network device discovery tool can help you find devices on a network to manage your device’s health, troubleshoot performance problems, and prepare for your network’s future.

For the first time, a software load balancer exceeds 2-million RPS on a single Arm instance. A few weeks ago, while I was working on an HAProxy issue related to thread locking contention, I found myself running some tests on a server with an 8-core, 16-thread Intel Xeon W2145 processor that we have in our lab. Although my intention wasn’t to benchmark the proxy, I observed HAProxy reach 1.03 million HTTP requests per second.

A slow website or unreliable server caused by uptime issues within your network can drive away potential customers and could be costly and time-consuming to address if it happens repeatedly. A network uptime monitor will enable you to detect, diagnose, and aptly solve problems related to uptime while continuously observing your devices and automatically updating data visualizations.

With networks at the heart of the most modern business, network design can have a major impact on business outcomes. Finding the right balance of network performance, security, redundancy, and cost require a unique mix of project management and technical skill. To help you nail your next network design project, we’ll take a deep dive on the topic, provide a basic framework you can follow, and look at some best practices to keep in mind as you go.