New thinking on incident response

Airbnb matches thousands of travelers with over 2 million rental property listings on their website daily. Reliability is key to the success of the company valued at over $30 billion. A recent interview with a site reliability engineer at Airbnb covered some key metrics for incident response in the high visibility, high uptime operation. Beyond [...]

Calculating downtime cost with lots of zeros

Yesterday two high profile outages made the news. United Airlines experienced some kind of a router problem and halted flights for over an hour, and the New York Stock Exchange had to close trading for over three hours while they recovered from what was termed a software rollout issue. While not enough information has been [...]

Digging out with out-of-band

Whether this week's winter storm Juno lived up to the hype (Snowpocalypse, really?), the attention on disruptive weather does make you think about disaster recovery operations. With many people expected to be trapped at home or encouraged to stay at home with travel bans and $500 fines for violations, for IT support teams, out-of-band management [...]

Enjoy the holidays more with Uplogix

The holiday season is a weird mix of extremes within organizations. Some groups are busy trying to close out the quarter or maybe the tax year, while others drop off the grid for a couple weeks of guilt-free R&R to come back to a clean slate in January. For many in IT, the holidays are [...]

Network slowdowns top IT issues

IT groups in large companies still consider network outages and slowdowns as their greatest headaches. In a recent survey of over 400 IT managers in companies with 1,000 or more employees, just under half listed network issues as their most common unexpected issue. The most common day-to-day issues included application performance problems (37%), availability issues [...]

Taking Network Management Local to Enable REAL Automation

Despite decades of advancements in network speed, reach and security, the management of network devices is still a hands-on task. It involves reactive and often tedious actions open to human error. Traditional Network Management tools rely on the network itself to manage critical devices. This dependence on the network to manage the network is a [...]

Part 2 – Getting ready for the Internet of Things

Whatever number of billions of devices you are comfortable with predicting for the Internet of Things (IoT) over the next 5-10 years, no one seems to be arguing that there is not a massive growth of IP-enabled devices already underway. And this expansion of end nodes means more work for network infrastructure, whether it's aggregation [...]

Amazon’s PrimeAir faces the automation checklist

In a 60 Minutes interview that relatively few people actually saw, but many are now reading about, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos showed off a couple of Amazon delivery drones. The idea is that at some point in the future, one of these eight-rotor robots would fly a <5 lb. Amazon purchase to you in 30 [...]

That’s our point, entirely

Incremental improvements to traditional network monitoring tools would really be like putting lipstick on a pig - you would still have a flawed solution.  A recent article on The Register entitled "What's wrong with network monitoring tools? Where do I start..." was all about incremental improvements to traditional network management methods. These improvements just point out [...]

Deploying and managing services with Uplogix

Local Management has some clear benefits for managed service providers who use Uplogix to deploy gear faster, manage it better, and control costs while hitting their SLAs. Uplogix is working with one of the top carriers in the world to deploy and manage services for a large federal customer. They are using Local Management throughout [...]