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What's in your network?

scottm
1 minute read time
There is a credit card commercial that asks, "What's in your wallet?" I'm going to ask, "What's in your network?" Sure, you might be able to tell me what's in your network right now, but can you still tell me about a device when it's down? Its model and serial number? The modules or line cards installed? Which interfaces are in use and how much bandwidth they use?

Maybe you have all that, so let's kick it up a notch. Can you tell me what the configuration of the device was last night? What about last week or last month? Some of these bits of information can be important when troubleshooting or when you have to replace a failed piece of equipment. If you are new at this, you may not realize that some changes can take long periods of time to impact your network. Sometimes they don't actually kick in until a device is rebooted or when a failover takes place. This can lead to misdiagnosing the cause of a failure.


I actually had something like this happen last week. I did a failover to a secondary load balancer so I could install a new license on the primary. While I was working on this, we started getting reports of an encryption certificate. It turned out the certificate configuration on the secondary unit hadn't been completed correctly months ago. However, from my immediate perspective, no configuration had changed...


On a related note, are you using centralized logging or are all your logs on your devices? If you aren't using centralized logging, you are taking away an important troubleshooting tool. Don't turn off local logging, it's really inconvenient when it's not there, but supplement that with centralized logs that you keep longer and will survive a reboot. Centralized logs also let you see all the events happening in your environment at the same time. This makes it much easier to correlate events when tracking down a root cause.


So I ask, do you know what's in your network? What other ideas and tools do you have for helping know your network?

  • Between delving into deeper areas by adding more the of the Solarwinds products and the implementation of a SIEM (not SW product) we are able to see better what is going on in the actual network.  We are finding strange devices communicating to the outside world.  Now we are able to start filtering out the "noise" and getting to a point where we have a better understanding of what is actually running on the network.  We will continue to refine what is there.

  • We recently had an issue where a certificate expired causing an interruption in service. As we get deeper into deploying the SolarWinds product suite, it is helping us to find/fix those broken processes to deliver better service to our customers and avoid interruptions like these from re-occurring. It’s important to recognize and take advantage of the opportunities  the tool supplies to work together better. It has already helped to break down the silo barriers a little more and talk to each other to be more proactive. We use a centralized logging system as well as the local logging. There are checks and balances needed from various standpoints to help us be successful in what we do.

  • We serve up our own cloud environment to our clients. We have a Cloud Team, and Networking Team for those such things. I just implement the monitoring for those teams, then give them the access that they need. Done, and done. :-)

    I work more with external clients on monitoring their environments, etc.

  • Actually I do not know what is in my network....... This is a good thing and by design emoticons_silly.png

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