I've been doing Data Center (DC) design recently and the customers are interested in what to monitor and why it should be monitored. At first, a DC is just another set of edge devices, albeit servers, connected to a set of access switches. But the traffic patterns and usage in the DC is much different...

I've written in this blog about various reasons for using network automation but it is time to put them together. Counting down… 7. Performance and SLAs The first thing that network management does is performance monitoring. It's conceptually easy, but surprisingly challenging, primarily...

I'm a proponent of network management automation and found a related blog post, Why End Users Love BPM , by long-time friend Scott Menter, who is working at BP Logix. BP Logix makes products for automating business processes. Scott's post discusses what happens when people are forced to run errands...

Networks use the same devices in many different roles, so configuration validation based on device type isn't sufficient. There are some configuration things that can be checked across all the devices of a certain type in your network, such as checking the syslog and NTP configuration, or verifying...

My previous post talked about the basics of verifying a configuration prior to deployment as a way to minimize the number of incorrect configurations that are fielded. The second topic, which is closer to the original NANOG posting comments, is with respect to auditing existing configurations to make...

Jimmy Ray Purser, a blogger and video blogger for Cisco and Network World, just did a blog with that title . In that blog post, he makes several comments that are right on target with the deficiency of most network management systems: - It is a lot of manual correlation - Correlation, Correlation, Correlation...

I recently did a recording for Cisco of a presentation that I've done at VoiceCon about troubleshooting VoIP in converged networks. This recording, along with links to the audio files referenced in it, is available from the Cisco Learning Network web site at: https://cisco.hosted.jivesoftware.com...

I'm sure that most of you have some sort of network monitoring system in place and that you've looked at utilization of your important links. I was looking at a set of links recently that had some common characteristics as well as one unexpected attribute. The utilization charts below are for...

While I was at VoiceCon in San Francisco, CA a few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to stop by Cisco and record two video segments for the Cisco Learning Network . The first of these videos is now online: What CIOs Should Know About Network Analysis . I did this presentation a while back for a the Baltimore...

One of the new technology rages in the market today is Cloud Computing (and Storage), of which Amazon's Web Services ( S3 , SQS, SimpleDB, EC2, and HaDoop) is one example. As I was reading through the example of "Grep the Web" described in the paper Cloud Architectures , I wondered what...