Infrastructure is not that important to the future of network monitoring.

Infrastructure is not that important to the future of network monitoring.
When we examine the challenges posed by today's digital world, it becomes clear that IT operators must be agile and ready for any technological advance. For the industry to continue to thrive and grow, we must continue to look to the future of information technology. To prepare for the future, we must first understand the changes underway, and there have been several notable changes in the world of operations in recent years. The first is virtualization. That is the reason why we went from a server without a simple operating system running a few applications to a server running many virtualized "servers". These servers were abstracted by virtualizing the underlying server hardware. This allowed operators to run multiple "servers" on a single physical server. The benefit is a more balanced workload across the infrastructure and the ability to consolidate virtual machines onto fewer physical servers, which means less upfront investment for them. IT operators. The second change took place in the advent and overwhelming adoption of containers. Containers are similar to virtualization, except that they take abstraction to the next level. Rather than simply virtualizing hardware and running full operating systems on each virtual machine, containers run on top of a host's or host's operating system. of a node. This means that many workloads run on one operating system. These nodes do not have to be on bare metal. They could also be virtual machines. The idea is that there is a "server" that can run many containers and balance the workload between these servers to gain efficiency. The last shift, the most recent, is Functions as a Service (FaaS). Some people call this server without a server because it eliminates the need for server maintenance within the organization. That's not to say there isn't a server somewhere performing the function, it's just that someone else is making sure it works. FaaS allows software developers to write just their business logic and then download it to a FaaS service, with a public cloud provider like AWS. Servers running containers that follow business logic are completely abstract, leaving organizations with the ability to focus solely on application development.

The infrastructure is not important.

Due to the abstraction of hardware and the ephemeral nature of modern applications, we will no longer be interested in infrastructure for years to come. The more we remove ourselves and our apps from bare metal, the less we need to worry about it. Think about it. If an operator runs a fully serverless application in a public cloud, not only do they not need to worry about the infrastructure that supports it, they also don't. possible for the operator to monitor. There is no way to access metrics from the network or servers behind the containers running the code. In the case of containers, DevOps teams running applications on a well-built or cloud-managed Kubernetes cluster shouldn't have to worry about the hardware that runs it. Increasingly, the management of K8 or similar clusters will be "outsourced" to the cloud and neither the hardware under these managed clusters nor the clusters themselves will refer to the company running the application. The reason why outsourcing this work makes sense is that, with the abstraction of the computer, the hardware and its operation become more of a commodity.

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Monitoring this is observing

So the question arises: what does the future of surveillance look like? To answer this question, we need to focus on the application rather than the workloads running on the infrastructure. Observability is a good way to think about this. This includes metrics, logs, and traces pulled or sent directly from our workload or application. With this data, we can infer the current state of a system from its external outputs and gain context to understand this state. High cardinality in our surveillance data was once a reason and something everyone tried to avoid, but to make an application observable, it was essential to store extremely cardinal data to really analyze the problem. As long as the operator can identify the part of the application at the root of the failure, he will be able to query the data logs and determine if the problem is related to a particular node. from the database. Unusual data traffic should be easy to detect, especially if writes cause delays. Overall, the way we monitor our network is changing whether we like it or not. As such, the following challenge presents itself to IT operators: Adapt and embrace change now, or become irrelevant in the future. Martin Hodgson, Country Manager UK & I at Paessler AG