escape from reality
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NetBeez – Private Distributed Monitoring
I have a T-shirt from the nice folks at NetBeez, and on the back it says “Ask me about my Beez!” Naturally people can’t resist asking and I’ll happily explain, but on the off chance that you’re not lucky enough to be standing behind me I’m going to share my thoughts on NetBeez and the product sample they were kind enough to let me play with.
NetBeez at NFD9
I met NetBeez at Networking Field Day 9 where they presented their distributed monitoring solution. I’m not going to repeat what they said for the most part, so if you have time, it’s worth watching their full presentations from the NetBeez page at Tech Field Day.
The high level overview of the NetBeez solution is that they offer small, cheap, plug-and-play network agents that you can put on your network, from where they will perform connectivity and performance tests and report back to a central dashboard which can generate reports, statistics and alerts. The agents are designed to be cheap enough that you could put one on every remote site and monitor, say, access to a critical corporate server and find out quickly which remote sites are seeing Continue reading
Cisco ACI in the CNPES Cert (Engineering Specialist)
Cisco’s current network programmability certs uses two exams per cert, with the second exam focusing on ACI. That represents the first ACI-focused specialist exams from Cisco, and a great reason to learn about ACI and validate that knowledge. Today’s post looks at the ACI-focused exam for the Cisco CNPES Cert exam: the 600-512 NPENGACI exam. We’ll look at both the exam and a related video course.
Other posts in this series:
- Introduction to Cisco’s SDN Certifications
- Cisco Network Programmability (SDN) Intro Course
- The Cisco CNPES Cert: The First Exam and Course
Overview
First, to set the stage, Cisco rolled out their network programmability (read: SDN) certifications over a period of months, mostly in 2014. Figure 1 shows these four certs, with the engineering specialist cert focusing on engineering and implementation.
Figure 1: Overview of Cisco SDN Certifications
Today’s post focuses on the second exam: the 600-512 NPENGACI exam. The name itself is a bit of a mouthful:
Network Programmability ENGineering with ACI
Basically, the NPENG 600-504 exam covers SDN implementation excluding ACI, NPENGACI 600-512 exam includes ACI.
This list provides the links for more details – for the certification, each of the two exams, and each of Cisco’s two Continue reading
Vertically Integrated Musings
Packet Pushers podcast is a constant source of inspiration for my blog posts. Recently I stumbled upon Rob Sherwood’s explanation of how they package Big Cloud Fabric:
It’s a vertically integrated solution, from Switch Light OS to our SDN controller and Big Cloud Fabric application.
Really? What happened to openness and disaggregation?
Read more ...The Default Topology that routes traffic out to the Internet
Hello Everyone, I'm helping someone in the community and I'm going to share my Router 1 config so that users that want to routeEnterprise IP Routing Best Practices
What motivated me to write this post is a state of the IP routing of some of the enterprise networks I’ve seen.
A quick show ip route command reveals a non-disentanglable mixture of dynamic and static route with multiple points of redistribution and complex,
rigid filtering rules, something you’d only see in your bad dream or a CCIE-level lab. It certainly takes
a good engineer to understand how it works and even that can take up to several hours. I think the reason for that
is that people have generally been concentrated on learning about the routing protocol, how it works, all the knobs you can twist
to influence a routing decision logic. However, one thing often overlooked is the routing protocols best practice design,
i.e. when and how to use a particular protocol.
And since the latter is often an acquired skill, a lot of not-so-lucky engineers end up with wrong ideas and concepts
in the heads. Below I’ll try to list what I{:.underline} consider a best practice design of today’s enterprise networks.
Enterprise IP Routing Best Practices
What motivated me to write this post is a state of the IP routing of some of the enterprise networks I’ve seen.
A quick show ip route command reveals a non-disentanglable mixture of dynamic and static route with multiple points of redistribution and complex,
rigid filtering rules, something you’d only see in your bad dream or a CCIE-level lab. It certainly takes
a good engineer to understand how it works and even that can take up to several hours. I think the reason for that
is that people have generally been concentrated on learning about the routing protocol, how it works, all the knobs you can twist
to influence a routing decision logic. However, one thing often overlooked is the routing protocols best practice design,
i.e. when and how to use a particular protocol.
And since the latter is often an acquired skill, a lot of not-so-lucky engineers end up with wrong ideas and concepts
in the heads. Below I’ll try to list what I{:.underline} consider a best practice design of today’s enterprise networks.