Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

As network teams constantly search for new ways to simplify and optimize their networks, it helps to hear from experts who have spent years at the center of these transformations. One of these voices is Fabio D’Avino, a specialist in Network as a Service (NaaS) with more than seven years of experience researching, designing, and building global network services across industries.

A little while ago, I wrote a piece with the provocative title, "The End of the Network Engineer as We Know It?" It struck a chord because it articulated a shift many of us feel in our bones: the ground is moving beneath our feet. The traditional, well-defined corporate network has dissolved into a sprawling, borderless ecosystem of public clouds, SaaS platforms, and the vast, untamed internet. The old role, focused on the care and feeding of devices within our four walls, is no longer sufficient.

These days, maintaining uptime of your servers and other infrastructure elements remains as critical as ever—but it’s not enough. Quite simply, even the best server reliability metrics won’t mean a thing if the user experience is poor. What truly matters is understanding the service levels your users experience, whether they’re accessing apps through a web browser or interacting with API-based services.

HAProxy is the workhorse in front of countless APIs and apps because it’s fast, lean, and flexible. Because it sits on the traffic hot path, it’s also your earliest warning system when something slows down or breaks entirely. This means that monitoring it isn’t optional. You need to see connection queues and retries, per-stage timings, health-check failures, and spikes in error statuses to catch incidents before users do.