LoveMyTool - Open Community for Network Management and Monitoring

IPv6 Adoption Challenges (by Jim MacLeod)

So far there have been two World IPv6 Days, and two of the five Regional Internet Registries (NICs) have reached IPv4 exhaustion, so everyone has deployed IPv6. Wait, they haven’t? Here’s why.

IPv6 isn’t Compatible

IPv4 is the primary protocol of the Internet. The Internet changed the way we interact with data, with the world around us, and with each other. It is a primary utility as real as water and power.

The primary problem with IPv6 is that it is not directly compatible with IPv4. Transition mechanisms are required to enable IPv6-IPv4 communication, adding an additional level of complication over the protocol transition It is a similar problem to adopting hydrogen-powered cars: people won’t buy them until there are refueling stations, and the stations won’t get built until enough people buy them. However, the problem is more complicated with IPv6: imagine if hydrogen-powered cars couldn’t use the same roads as gas-powered cars. “Transition mechanisms” would consist of car-hauling trucks or changing cars partway through the trip. Even if such mechanisms were automated, there would still be hesitation about adoption.

Network Monitoring and Analysis Strategy for the Cloud (by Jim MacLeod)

The cloud is a growing trend in outsourced computing power. On the upside, services can scale horizontally to handle load – but the cost increases with the number of servers. On the downside, there’s less visibility into application and network internals. The paradox is that, while it costs more money to run more servers, it’s more difficult to get the data necessary to troubleshoot and optimize to reduce the need for more servers.

While there are tools to allow packet capture in virtual environments, they’re generally not available in a cloud. Cloud providers won’t give you access to virtual taps, because public cloud multitenancy will expose data from multiple cloud customers. Fortunately, there are situations where cloud packet-level analysis is still possible, by focusing directly on the endpoints.

The goal of packet-level analysis in the cloud generally focuses on two things:

1. End-User Experience
2. Application efficiency of cloud-hosted services

IPV6 Means More Interim Headaches (by Jim MacLeod)

On June 6th of this year, some of the biggest names in tech joined together for World IPv6 Launch Day to herald the transition from IPv4. Now that the fanfare has died down, what does this mean for you? Many think it will mean more headaches than reward with administrators complaining that IPv6 has longer addresses, and users complaining of application delays due to IPv6 to IPv4 fallback.

Let’s take a look at these two potential issues and how to solve them.

Problem: The Addressing Trap
Ask anyone what the benefit of IPv6 is, and most will say more available addresses, which means longer addresses. Initial reaction from many engineers is that these new addresses are too long to remember. This is only partially right; understanding how the IPv6 addresses work, along with some planning, results in addressing that is as simple as current IPv4 addressing.

Traditional Flow-Based Monitoring Not Good Enough (by Jay Botelho)

Don't Just Go with the Flow: When Traditional Flow-Based Monitoring Is Not Enough

Enterprise network monitoring presents many complex challenges, with widely varying requirements based on the unique network architectures of each individual enterprise. Fortunately there are a variety of different tools and methods to meet most any need. Flow-based monitoring solutions are by far the most popular, with at least 30-40 different vendors offering flow-based network monitoring products. These solutions can collect a relatively detailed set of network performance data and provide a long-term record of network behavior, all based on data already available from the network infrastructure itself.

However, the data presented may not always be 100% accurate. Some flow-based technologies rely on sampling, and even those that typically don’t can revert to a sampling mode when networks get busy. After all, you’re relying on your network infrastructure (switches and routers) as the data source, so when the network gets busy and a switch or router becomes taxed, it will revert to providing network services and the expense of supplying flow-based data. This could mean simply reverting to a sampling mode, which is inherently not 100% accurate, or it could mean entire lapses in flow-based reporting, right when you need it most!

Managing Real-time Data on Your Network – Back to Basics (by Jay Botelho)

VoIP and Real Time management basics!

Voice over IP (VoIP) is already a business necessity, and video over IP is fast on its heels. The growth of video on IP networks is astounding, and the sum of all forms of video (TV, video on demand [VoD], Internet, and P2P) will be approximately 86% of global consumer traffic by 2016 (see this Cisco paper for details). Though a necessity, the real-time nature of voice and video traffic is often at odds with traditional network traffic, creating undo angst in your IT department. Real-time data, especially video, can bog down enterprise networks and make it difficult to perform mission-critical tasks.

With all this real-time data competing for network bandwidth we need to get back to the basics. Use the right tools for the job, tackle the three VoIP killers - latency, jitter, and packet loss, and effectively manage the end-user experience. Fortunately, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel here. Everything you need is readily available on the market today.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the challanges -   

The Right Tools for the Job

Before we can determine the tool, we need to determine the job. Given the maturity of VoIP today, the job is typically ongoing monitoring and troubleshooting for most organizations. But for the sake of completeness, or for those situations where a VoIP upgrade may be in the plans, let’s address the entire VoIP lifecycle, which includes a pre-deployment assessment, deployment and maintenance.

Security Threats Continued: Why They Are Targeting Your Business? (by Jim MacLeod)

Over the last few posts, I’ve dissected the major security threats that are happening on your network today. The first piece dissected the “Who,” mainly how do you classify these perpetrators based on a set characteristics that they share. The next post took a look at the “How” hackers enter your network and what you can do to help safeguard it. For the final piece of this series we will look at the “Why.”

Where is your Attack Level?

While there are lots of sociological theories and studies on why people vandalize and steal, this post will focus the “Why” on the current most common motives that drive hackers to penetrate your network.

1. 1.    “Lulz”
2. 2.    Profit
3. 3.    Ideology

Security Threats Continued: The How (by Jim MacLeod)

For our first part of “Security Threats: The Who, The How, and The Why,” we discussed the Who aspect, dissecting the three main classification of attackers: The Script Kiddie, Insiders, and Juggernauts.

This blog will cover the How aspect of today’s threat landscape, providing some tips and tricks to ensure that your network is protected as much as possible. The Why will be following in our third and final installment.

How do the Script Kiddies, Insiders, and Juggernauts penetrate your system? 

1. Denial of Service (DoS)
2. Vulnerability
3. Weakness

Security Threats: The Who, the How, the Why (By Jim MacLeod)

As networks grow more complex, the process of securing and managing endpoints, applications and confidential information has become more challenging than ever before. Last year alone saw a dizzying array of security incidents and breaches, including Symantec, SONY, Fox News, and others. Security is becoming more and more essential to business operations, but traditional defenses aren't working to the degree that companies require. Meeting the new security service levels starts with understanding each type of threat to establish a unified security program.

While every attack is unique in its origin, execution, and range, defending against cyber attacks today can be abstracted down to three of the classic five W’s: Who, How/What and Why. The other two W’s, Where and When, are constant for network defense: your network, 24/7/365.

This blog post will introduce the elements of these categories, then present a deep dive on the Who category.

Insurance For Your Network? (by Jay Botelho)

Insurance is a way of life, right? We insure our lives, our cars, our homes, and even mundane things like our cell phones. In short, we insure those things that are dear to us and that we cannot do without. So how about your network? If you’re a network engineer the network is pretty dear to you, and your company certainly cannot do without it, so it seems like a good candidate for insurance too. But what kind of insurance do you need? What is it that you need to protect most about your network?

Last year was labelled the “Year of the Hack,” by IT security professionals, with an onslaught of breaches that were financially and politically motivated. This year seems to be following in those same footsteps, with the latest mega-breach of Global Payments in April 2012 with 1.5 million accounts compromised. And on the political front, just do a Google search on cyber crime and see how worried everyone is about cyber criminals targeting the Summer Olympics in London.

Current protections are not enough. Although current security systems certainly protect against a significant number of attacks, they obviously don’t protect against all attacks. So let’s buy some insurance!

Apdex - Application Performance Index (by Jay Botelho)

The Application Performance Index, commonly known as Apdex, is an open standard of the Apdex Alliance. The members of the alliance see a need to have a clear and consistent way to report on application performance, something that is sorely lacking in the industry today. Think about it for a minute. Do you know of a standard method to measure and display application performance? Application performance monitoring is certainly widely available today, and is considered an entire market segment by industry analysts. However, if you’ve done any evaluations at all of application performance monitoring solutions you know there’s no standard way of reporting the data. The reporting methods are highly disparate, leaving you with the responsibility of determining how you want to have application performance reported, and then searching for a compatible solution. This is, of course, tedious and time consuming, and it’s what the Apdex Alliance hopes to change by promoting a simple, standard method for reporting on overall application performance.