At NetCraftsmen, our clients Rest Assured® knowing that a team of industry leaders, visionaries, and innovators are dedicated to ensuring their IT networks are able to meet and adapt to today’s enterprise demands. As part of that assurance, we share the wisdom of our craftsmen in a variety of ways, including regular articles on our highly popular blog.
As 2016 comes to a close, we thought we’d share some of our most popular tips and business insights that appeared on our blog this past year.
Network Monitoring: Top Performance Items to Watch, Part 1
What is eating your network? What is quietly killing performance? What performance items should you be watching, but probably are not? Here’s our list of the top items to monitor, including utilization, broadcasts, errors, and discards.
Some people think Cisco Nexus 9K automatically means doing ACI, but that’s not truly the case. There are several valid ways for network engineers to design around Cisco Nexus 9K. This post discusses each one.
Why BGP Flowspec Is a Step Forward in DDoS Migration
Do you recall when service providers typically had to call upon Remote Trigger Blackhole to mitigate DDoS attacks? Most recently, you may have used ACLs, which are the most widely used mitigation tool for DDoS. If you’re looking for a better tool for DDoS mitigation on the networks you administer, BGP Flowspec is a step up from ACLs and RTBH.
Succeeding With Network Management Tools
You may think that if you buy a new product or technology, it’ll make things better. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it just adds work, or the labor costs exceed the benefits. Adding a new network management tool is an expensive, time-consuming, and sometimes emotional process. Here’s our best advice for success.
A number of new innovations to networking are being created and the network world is in a state of transition. For example, source routing is back, but it isn’t anything like the old source route bridging (thank goodness). This post explains the new version, called segment routing.
Cisco Mobile and Remote Access Troubleshooting Basic Connectivity
Cisco MRA enables external software and hardware clients to register to Cisco UC solutions without a VPN. This blog entry explains procedures used when troubleshooting or validating an MRA deployment. These procedures can be used to validate the initial deployment or to troubleshoot connectivity problems for an individual user.
An Easy New Way to Inventory Everything in Your Data Center
Have you ever needed to know what applications are running on your network? Have you ever needed to determine the set of protocols and ports used by an application so that firewall rules can be created? What if you needed to know all the IT assets in your business? Cisco Tetration is making it easier to find out.
What to Do About Slow Business Applications
Your business applications are mysteriously running slow — but the network team says everything is running normally and each individual component of your key business application seems to be functioning correctly. How does your IT staff find the problem? There are two approaches to identifying the issue.
The 5 Questions Your IT Partners Should Ask You
There are plenty of questions you should be asking potential IT partners. But often, executives don’t think much about the questions that their vendors ought to be asking them — and seem surprised by how many questions we have for them before we begin an engagement. What should they ask about you? Here are five questions to start.
Weighing the Pros and Cons of Outsourcing IT Support
Should your organization consider outsourcing part or all of your IT support? You may have heard some outsourcing horror stories, but there’s a lot of value in outsourcing for almost every company. Ultimately, there are more pros than cons, but it’s important to understand both.
If any of these blog posts spark ideas or questions, please reach out for a deeper conversation.