SPEED VS STABILITY IN NETWORK OPERATIONS. A FALSE TRADE OFF?
SPEED VS STABILITY IN NETWORK OPERATIONS. A FALSE TRADE OFF? In network operations, time pressure is constant. There are always pending tasks, business requests, customer activations, upgrades, and unexpected issues. At the same time, every change introduced into a live environment carries inherent risk. This creates a familiar dilemma for operational teams. Should speed or […]
THE BIGGEST MISCONCEPTION ABOUT 24/7 NOC SERVICES
THE BIGGEST MISCONCEPTION ABOUT 24/7 NOC SERVICES Downtime is not just a technical problem. It is a financial one. According to widely cited industry research, the cost of IT downtime can reach thousands of dollars per minute depending on the business model and sector. Even short lived incidents can quickly translate into revenue loss, customer […]
FROM SOURCE OF TRUTH TO NETWORK ORCHESTRATOR
FROM SOURCE OF TRUTH TO NETWORK ORCHESTRATOR I want to share a recently completed project that, for me, is a very good example of how network automation should actually look in production. At ITcare, we built a full automation framework around an Arista Networks IP fabric architecture for a customer operating POPs around the world, […]
Network Reconvergence Is Not an Outage: Why Monitoring Must Understand Network Behavior
Network Reconvergence Is Not an Outage: Why Monitoring Must Understand Network Behavior Many networks reconverge exactly the way they are designed to. A link drops, traffic shifts, paths update, and services continue to run. But the monitoring system does not understand that behavior. It sees a short change in state and sends an outage alert […]
A PRACTICAL PATH TO OUTSOURCING WITHOUT UNNECESSARY RISK
A PRACTICAL PATH TO OUTSOURCING WITHOUT UNNECESSARY RISK For many organizations, outsourcing is no longer viewed as an all or nothing decision. Instead of transferring large operational responsibilities in a single step, teams increasingly prefer a gradual and controlled approach. This shift is driven by a simple concern. Large transitions introduce uncertainty, while smaller changes […]
CISCO ROUTING POLICIES: POWERFUL BUT PAINFUL TO EDIT
CISCO ROUTING POLICIES: POWERFUL BUT PAINFUL TO EDIT At ITcare we work daily across many platforms and I am comfortable operating networks regardless of vendor. Cisco, Juniper Networks, Arista Networks, HPE Aruba Networking, Nokia, IP Infusion and other beasts are all part of the environments we manage. That said, I am still far more […]
ROUTING POLICIES ARE NO LONGER ROUTE MAPS
ROUTING POLICIES ARE NO LONGER ROUTE MAPS For a long time, routing policy design across many platforms revolved around a single concept. The route map. It worked, but it was rigid, static, and hard to scale. As networks grew and requirements became more complex, this model quickly showed its limits. Modern service provider and data […]
OBSERVABILITY, TELEMETRY, AND THE REALITY OF gNMI IN MULTI-VENDOR ENVIRONMENTS
OBSERVABILITY, TELEMETRY, AND THE REALITY OF gNMI IN MULTI-VENDOR ENVIRONMENTS While many networks are in freeze mode and changes are on hold, there is finally some space for experimentation, learning, and simply playing around with topics we normally postpone. This time at ITcare we decided to spend it diving deeper into observability using telemetry, and […]
MONITORING IS A CORRELATION PROBLEM, NOT A DASHBOARD PROBLEM
MONITORING IS A CORRELATION PROBLEM, NOT A DASHBOARD PROBLEM Many teams today run five or six monitoring tools at the same time. They use LibreNMS for one part, Nagios for another, Icinga for alerts, PRTG or SolarWinds for graphs, and then a few custom scripts on the side. Each tool does what it is supposed […]
IMPROVING BGP CONVERGENCE WITH JUNIPER RIB SHARDING
IMPROVING BGP CONVERGENCE WITH JUNIPER RIB SHARDING Many networks already run on very powerful routers. Quite often, the limitation is not the platform itself, but the lack of exploring what it can actually do. At ITcare we saw this a couple of times, especially for edge routers that peer with multiple Upstreams, Internet Exchanges, or […]