SNMP is still widely used in today’s networks. But modern telemetry and network observability are bringing changes to network monitoring. Today’s Heavy Networking is a roundtable discussion about alternatives to SNMP and real-world use cases for those alternatives. This episode was inspired by a request from listener Nikolay. He says… While telemetry (gRPC, etc.) is... Read more »

Service provider networks face a couple of difficult challenges: how to map service level agreements to actual network health and performance, and how to deliver service assurance to customers regardless of what happens on the network. On today’s sponsored Heavy Networking we talk with Cisco Systems about its approach to service assurance, how Cisco is... Read more »

There’s an old saying that a journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step. On today’s show, we talk about taking your first step into network automation with guest Joseph Nicholson. He’s been automating at NTT Data for many years now and has some perspective to share. He’s a network engineer by trade,... Read more »

Network automation is today’s topic with sponsor Gluware. Gluware provides a network automation platform that targets both network engineers and automation builders. On today’s Heavy Networking, we discuss how Gluware supports these two constituencies. We also talk about a recent product announcement, Gluware Labs. Gluware Labs includes a free Community Edition of Gluware software you... Read more »

If you participate in the public Internet by announcing your own netblocks, you should be familiar with Internet Routing Registries (IRRs) and the Routing Policy Specification Language (RPSL). These are tools that help you be a good network citizen. In a world of BGP hijacks and other problems, these tools matter more than ever. We... Read more »

Netris is tackling the issue of automating multi-tenancy in an AI data center. Netris has your answer to this challenge, and it’s a solution certified to work with NVIDIA. We’re going to get into the nuts and bolts of Netris network automation with Alex Saroyan, CEO and co-founder of Netris. Along the way, we will... Read more »

While studying for the CCIE Service Provider certification, Andrew Ohanian assembled a workbook to help him prepare. It’s packed with lab exercises, and Andrew has turned it into a free Web resource that anyone can access. On today’s Heavy Networking, we talk with Andrew about what’s in the guide, the state of the CCIE SP,... Read more »

On today’s Heavy Networking we talk with Dan Wade about testing the network, inspired by Dan’s talk at AutoCon 2: “Step 0: Test the Network.” We discuss why testing is a good idea, and then explore four types of network testing, including unit tests and integration tests. We dig into Yang, RESTCONF, NETCONF and gNMI... Read more »

On today’s Heavy Networking, a roundtable panel considers whether a modern network needs to be built around underlays and overlays. This isn’t just Ethan yelling at clouds. This is a legitimate question pondering the real-world value of an overlay/underlay approach. Is overlay everywhere overkill, or is that the architecture we need to deliver a safe,... Read more »

Model Context Protocol (MCP) is a very new protocol that provides a standard way to link AI models to a variety of data sources and tools. As the industry heads toward agentic AI–in which an AI agent interacts with disparate applications, data sources, and other agents to achieve a task–MCP provides the protocol glue. On... Read more »