In recent years, the rapid development of cloud-based networking, network abstractions such as SD-WAN, and controller-based campus networking has meant that basic, day-to-day network operations have become easier for non-network engineers. The result we’re starting to see today is a sort of consolidation of networking tasks, leading to a need for only a small number of highly skilled network engineers to handle the less frequent heavy lifting of advanced design and troubleshooting.

In today’s digital world, data is generated faster and at a larger scale than ever before. With software architectures increasingly adopting distributed, cloud-based models, network infrastructures have become complex webs of virtual and physical devices.

Traffic telemetry is the data collected from network devices and used for analysis. With traffic telemetry, engineers can gain real-time visibility into traffic patterns, correlate events, and make predictions of future traffic patterns. As a critical input to a network observability platform, this data can help monitor and optimize network performance, troubleshoot issues, and detect security threats. However, traffic telemetry can be difficult to understand.

In an ideal world, organizations can establish a single, citadel-like data center that accumulates data and hosts their applications and all associated services, all while enjoying a customer base that is also geographically close. As this data grows in mass and gravity, it’s okay because all the new services, applications, and customers will continue to be just as close to the data. This is the “have your cake and eat it too” scenario for a scaling business’s IT.

In the early hours of Wednesday, January 25, Microsoft’s public cloud suffered a major outage that disrupted their cloud-based services and popular applications such as Sharepoint, Teams, and Office 365. Microsoft has since blamed the outage on a flawed router command which took down a significant portion of the cloud’s connectivity beginning at 07:09 UTC.

Network observability is critical. You need the ability to answer any question about your network—across clouds, on-prem, edge locations, and user devices—quickly and easily. But network observability is not always easy. To be successful, you need to collect network telemetry, and that telemetry needs to be extensive and diverse. And once you have that raw telemetry data, you need to interpret it.

The whole point of our beloved networks is to deliver applications and services to real people sitting at computers. So, as network engineers, monitoring the performance and efficiency of our networks is a crucial part of our job. Flow data, in particular, is a powerful tool that provides valuable insights into what’s happening in our networks for ongoing monitoring and troubleshooting poor-performing applications.

This week marks a decade since the ALBA-1 submarine cable began carrying traffic between Cuba and the global internet. On 20 January 2013, I published the first evidence of this historic subsea cable activation which enabled Cuba to finally break its dependence on geostationary satellite service for the country’s international connectivity. ALBA-1 was one of my first lessons on how geopolitics can shape the physical internet.

I spent the last few months of 2022 sharing my experience transitioning networks to the cloud, with a focus on spotting and managing some of the associated costs that aren’t always part of the “sticker price” of digital transformation.