Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Software as a Service (SaaS) is a mainstream way of bringing enterprise applications to hundreds of thousands of application users at a stable cost. Rather than loading client software on a desktop PC, we lease software from the cloud, and monitor how the SaaS application is delivered. That makes it available to everyone in the enterprise.

It would be ideal if every network device you managed across all your client sites was from the same manufacturer, but for most MSPs that’s not the case—over 75% of MSPs manage four or more network vendors for their clients, and some manage upwards of 20. Even though taking care of diverse networks is standard procedure for most service providers, managing gear from multiple vendors is still, well, complex. It means handling different operating systems, different languages, and more.

Calico is a popular CNI plugin for Kubernetes. It leverages Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) for communicating routes available on nodes. This method fosters a highly scalable networking model between our workloads.

Since load balancers are active devices that can be included in the design of a WAN, the question arises: Should we adapt our monitoring scheme to include something that could be called Load Balancer Monitoring? To answer this question we can assume that WAN monitoring is based on the following fact: the behaviour of communication links directly affects the performance of applications and therefore the entire platform.

To fully understand what NetFlow is and why it’s used for network monitoring, we first need to know what a flow is. When computers need to talk to one another they establish communication channels, commonly referred to as connections. (Technically speaking, these communication channels can only be called connections when the TCP protocol is involved.) A flow refers to any connection or connection-like communication channel.