Blog

Here we are, it’s Summer, it must be time for another rant (ahem, “carefully reasoned polemic”) about Network Management (NM). What should NM tools do for us? How might they [...]

This blog describes some of the snags in modern coding / automation, and what might be done about them. Automation is great. I happen to love coding and have been [...]

Enterprises dependent upon a high-availability application should investigate active-active data center designs to ensure reliability and resiliency. Any enterprise running a high-availability application must answer the following fundamental question: How do [...]

Have you noticed that “active-active” has gotten over-used in networking? Not to mention, used inappropriately? The industry could use a little more accuracy in terminology, and perhaps candor, around the [...]

Will new network protocols improve the net? What will it take for any of them to gain acceptance? Do we really need new network protocols? The short answer is yes. Sure, [...]

I recently talked with a customer about selecting an approach for network automation; a new technology for them. I did some up-front planning, made some notes, and then we talked [...]

How do you build a global SD-WAN leveraging Cisco Viptela routers and Equinix Performance Hubs? This blog describes a generic approach, informed by some ongoing design work. My intent is [...]

Network automation was a big topic at Cisco Live 2018. Susie Wee announced that Cisco’s DevNet now has more than 500,000 registered users. There was coverage by other bloggers including: [...]

NetCraftsmen sent a large group of our employees to Cisco Live 2018 with three main goals. First, we wanted to focus on learning and growing our capabilities. Second, we wanted [...]

You may have noticed that NetCraftsmen does various types of assessments (network, security, etc.). One of the things I have noticed in doing them is that customer operational practices differ [...]

For a while now, I’ve been mulling over how to tell if interfaces are overloaded in a good automated way. Staring at 1000 interface utilization graphs is not efficient. How [...]

Is a slow application due to the network, an overloaded server, a poorly written database query, a bug in a client-side JavaScript module, or something else? Increasingly complex application stacks [...]