Network automation can feel overwhelming. The big questions: what to automate, where to start, and how to go about it? Luckily, experience helps, and we had two very experienced IT guys discuss it on The Monitoring Experts podcast. Daren Fulwell of IP Fabric is a self-proclaimed “old dog learning new tricks" in the network space, and Simon Bell of Paessler has been around long enough to remember writing DOS batch scripts for Novell networks. Together they discuss their perspectives of network automation and more importantly, they give some tips on how to approach it.
Founded in 1996, ASAC is an IT consulting company and MSP inAsturias, Spain. They offer a broad portfolio of products and servicesto their customers, who are mostly from the public sector, such asmunicipalities and county councils.
What is observability? And what do World War II planes have to do with it? In the very first episode of The Monitoring Experts podcast by Paessler, we get into these questions (and much more). You can listen to the full discussion, or read on below to find out how Greg Campion, our monitoring expert for the episode, defines observability.
For the past two years, I have started our annual reviews with the following quote: “Wow. 2020 was quite a hell ride for all of us! And I don't just mean us at Paessler, but really all of us. The whole planet experienced a rather exceptional year!“ Sascha Neumeier, Paessler AG
Paessler PRTG 22.4.81.1532 is now available in the stable release channel and comes with the experimental Ping v2 sensor, the experimental HTTP v2 sensor, a security update, and an update for German and Spanish language files.
The operation of data centers is enormously energy and cost intensive. In order to evaluate the efficiency of the energy used in data centers, there are several approaches that can be used to quantify energy efficiency. In this context, two key figures appear frequently:
The acronym APM can stand for both Application Performance Management and Application Performance Monitoring. Application Performance Management strives to detect and diagnose complex application performance problems to maintain an expected level of service; it is "the translation of IT metrics into business meaning." Here we deal with Application Performance Monitoring as a subset of any IT monitoring effort in networks of variable size.
Insurance is a 24/7 business, people need to be able to get in touch at any hour of the day regarding their policies, cover, and claims, so technology downtime is not an option – the company can’t afford to stand still for even a minute.
Wireless networking is a cornerstone of the “smart factory” concept, which requires the collection and transferal of data regarding the manufacturing process. While there are several types of wireless technology that can be used for manufacturing – such as 5G or Bluetooth – a common approach is industrial wireless LAN. This is what I will focus on in this article: what industrial WLANs are, and tips for monitoring them.
windCOREs are data centers inside wind turbines. This is a German innovation and is the first of its kind in the world. The windCORES brand belongs to the WestfalenWIND Group, which was founded in 2009. Active all over Germany, this energy provider has around 180 wind turbines and is headquartered in Paderborn, in North Rhine-Westphalia. In 2018, it launched a project to set up data centers inside wind turbines. The advantages are clear – after all, the data centers make use of the existing space and infrastructure of the turbines. What’s more, the energy is supplied directly from above.
PRTG 22.4.80.1553 is now available in the stable release channel! This version comes with the experimental NetApp SnapMirror v2 sensor, the experimental Port v2 sensor, and an update for all language files.
A central cornerstone of our Paessler PRTG monitoring software is its application programming interface, and our great development teams have been working on the new PRTG API v2 for some time now. In 2021, we released the alpha version of this new API together with the new UI and made it available for testing. In Version 22.4.81, which is due at the end of this year, we plan to drop the recommendation to only use it on test systems and will thus declare it stable enough to be activated on production systems. Then, in early 2023, we plan to declare the first API endpoints as stable, meaning that you can start using the available PRTG API v2 endpoints* for automation and integrations in your production systems.
To reliably monitor an HPE 3PAR StoreServ server, Paessler PRTG offers three native sensors, which I introduced some time ago in this article: 👉 Let's talk about sensors! HPE 3PAR Storage Server monitoring. Since that article was published, all of the sensors have moved out of beta status and are now fully supported. With this article I will show you how you can easily add and use the three sensors:
This is my fourth article about monitoring physical servers with Paessler PRTG. The first three articles were about Dell PowerEdge, IBM System X and Fujitsu servers. We also recently started recording video tutorials on these topics, so stay tuned!
The complexity of monitoring a data center increases with its size. In addition to monitoring IT components and the network infrastructure, the monitoring of environmental parameters is becoming more and more important. This is because both IT hardware and facilities play a critical role in large data center operations.