Month: January 2022

by Jim Meehan

This week I joined Augtera Networks as Sr. Director of Product and Product Marketing.  I’m not one to jump ship lightly – my tenures at Kentik and Arbor Networks were 7 and 11 years respectively.  So transitions like these create an opportunity for me to stop for a moment and reflect on the industry’s past and future, and my own as well.

I’ve spent my entire career in the world of infrastructure.  Much of it relating to networks, but also systems and software.  For as long as I’ve been immersed in it, the state of infrastructure has always been one step ahead of our ability to operate it as effectively as we’d like.  I’m old enough to remember when it seemed impossible just to generate the data we needed to properly troubleshoot networks.  The days when our best tooling was a packet sniffer on a cart in the corner of the data center.

An anomaly is defined by Oxford Dictionary as “a thing, situation, etc., that is different from what is normal or expected”. 

When you apply this definition to Networks we need to first determine the networking constructs on which determining what is not normal or expected is of business and operational significance. Then we need to determine the normal behavior of these networking constructs and what is not normal on an ongoing basis.

The question is not just a teaser. There is a fundamental reason for introducing this blog in this manner.

Because any SD-WAN implementation is a vendor specific mix of standard and proprietary building blocks, breaking the symbiotic relationship that network engineers had with network technology in the past.

Previously, network engineers were building an entire network stack  that included connecting links to the router, configuring interface IPs, configuring IGP, BGP peers, dampening, timers, BFD, queues, MPLS LSPs with RSVP FRR or LDP, MPLS VPN route distinguishers, route targets, and many more.