Practical Guide to Modern Networking Telemetry

Introduction

You’re probably interested in this book because you want to learn about collecting, measuring, and analyzing data from network devices and traffic to gain insights into network performance–network telemetry. Before diving into the tools, techniques, and technologies of modern network telemetry, let’s take a minute to talk about “the network” and the benefits and return on investment (ROI) that building robust observability options into your infrastructure can bring.

What IS “the Network,” Exactly?

In “The Ultimate Guide to Network Observability”, Avi wrote the following:

People often refer to “the network” in their organizations, but in most cases the network isn’t one entity. It’s a complex, diverse, fragmented, and loosely interconnected set of physical and virtual links and equipment, and it’s housed in a variety of places, including data centers, corporate wide area networks (WANs), private and public clouds, the internet, container environments, and even inside hosts. Organizations own and control some of those resources but simply pay to use others.

The environment remains largely the same today. Sure, the cloud has gotten cloudier (meaning opaque to users) even as it has become more ubiquitous within organizations of every size and scale. And at the same time, corporate LANs, WANs, data centers, and cloud environments have not become less complex (or sprawling, or expensive). In fact, investments in on-premises networking have increased alongside cloud-related ...