Container-Based WAN Monitoring

Container-based WAN monitoring might just sounds like some IT marketing buzzword BINGO, but Pete Welcher makes the argument that it’s a vital part of a networking toolkit. Rather than traditional monitoring tools that look at metrics that indicate what a user actually excperiences on the network, companies like ThousandEyes and Netbeez user container-based monitoring to actually probe the network from the client side without needing additional hardware, able to run in contianers on a Catalyst 9000 switch, for example.

Advice To Tech Field Day Sponsors

Greg Ferro is no stranger to Tech Field Day events. In this post, he uses his considerable event experience to offer some advice to future presenting companies. He addresses everything from knowing your audience, to how to approach demos, and building a company story over the course of two hours.

What is your netflow strategy?

Network flow data will only increase as network traffic grows within organizations. Nick Buraglio shares a review of various solutions on how to address and monitor flows, from Solarwinds, Splunk, Arbor, and more. In the end, his takeaway isn’t that one solution is inherently superior. Rather that there are a number of options for budgets and scale, so there’s no reason not to have something

Pluribus Networks… 2 Years Later

Pluribus Networks was a returning presenter for Ivan Pepelnjak, who first saw them at Networking Field Day in 2015. Overall this was the company’s fourth Networking Field Day presentation. Make sure to check out our full video coverage from their most recent appearance!

Troubleshooting Lessons Learned

Pete Welcher shares his lessons in troubleshooting, in this case it was the dreaded complaint of “the Wi-Fi is bad”. He breaks down how he approached two different scenarios with different companies. Both ended up using Netbeez’s client-side monitoring solution to help get regular and accurate upload and download speeds, which saved both human time, and increased accuracy. Make sure to checkout Pete’s post for an in-depth look into his techniques.

To SD-WAN or Not to SD-WAN — and How?

Pete Welcher has been seeing a lot of competing SD-WAN solutions, including a lot from presentations at past Networking Field Day events. He runs down how to determine if these solutions are ideal for your operations. First, if you’re heavily investing in a lot of Cisco routers, just use IWAN. But for organizations with equipment coming to end of life or need ease of deployment without much more needed than routing and QoS, SD-WAN is worth a look. Make sure to read Pete’s piece for all the details.