Network Monitoring using Azure

Hello guys I'm a junior NOC Engineer and my boss is asking me to research on migrating our monitoring to cloud services but i have little to no knowledge with regards to cloud monitoring. Is it possible/recommended to migrate our existing network monitoring which is PRTG to microsoft azure? or does it have a similar capability? i'm looking into grafana as a substitute but grafana datasource is very complicated, I can't even understand where grafana is pulling it's SNMP datasource from. thanks in advance

Keeping Manged Services Synced with Billing

As a small ISP, PPPoE is a lifesaver for broadband. When the customer doesn't pay the bill our billing system marks the account and invokes a web-service. On the next PPPoE attempt we fail the handshake.

For ME / MPLS there is currently no AAA service layer consumed by the customer that empowers us like the capabilities of DSL. How do other MSP's deal with this disconnect (pun). We just discovered a customer that stopped paying for ME services 2 years ago but we continued to deliver service because of the disconnect we have between billing and service delivery.

Thansk

Dual supervisor vs VSS pair

I understand what a dual supervisor could mean in terms of a single chasis with 2 supervisor cards such as the cisco 4500e series and how a VSS pair works (like 2x cisco 4500x series [single supervisor in each]) however are 2 switches in a VSS pair such as the 4500x series considered dual supervisor as one is active & standby and communicate over VSL?

I am just trying to understand termology being used as the Cisco documentation is confusing. Apologies if it is a stupid question!

Thanks

What text editors do you guys use?

I am currently using Notepad++ to compare and analyze large configs for different devices daily and wondering if there are better alternatives?

I have heard of emacs and vim but don't know the features that might help me.

Huge FiOS outage in Washington, DC and surrounding areas

Apologies if this isn’t the right spot for this, but I came here looking for any technical info about the huge FiOS outage that occurred today in DC and surrounding areas.

If you search Twitter for FiOS DC, you’ll see tons of people reporting outages, despite Verizon’s status page claiming everything’s fine. There are also some posts on r/washingtondc and r/nova.

Some have claimed that it’s a DNS issue, and that switching to Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 or Google’s 8.8.8.8 would alleviate the issue.

Anyone have any more info?

Help with Internal DDoS

Hi Everyone, our organisation is currently experiencing an internal DDoS attack where compromised clients on our internal networks including from our remote offices via L3 MPLS are SYN flooding external hosts.

We're getting log messages from our firewall of:

Possible SYN Flood on IF [LAN interface] - src: [internal IP]:54252 dst: [Google Cloud IP]:443

Possible SYN Flood on IF [LAN interface] - src: [internal IP]:49757 dst: [Microsoft]:443 - rate: 377/sec continues

We've run multiple anti-virus scans with Trend Micro and Malware Bytes on the source hosts and found nothing. We have considered dropping the hosts from the network, but since it's distributed there are at least a hundred different end user devices we would need to block. The source port changes but the destination port is always 443.

The destination address also changes to various different providers (Google, Microsoft, AT&T, etc.)

At the same time, we're also getting port scanned continuously:

Possible port scan detected - TCP scanned port list, 33277, 39671, 2807, 18075, 26461

Does anyone have any ideas on what we can do?

Need help picking a router for 2 Playstations.

Hi, we recently just got 100/100 download/upload speeds, and we noticed that or router was struggling to handle two simultaneously active ps4s, laptops, and phones. I was looking at three routers in particular, and they seem to be so similar that I don’t really know which one to pick. They are the Netgear R6700, the Archer C9, and the Asus AC1700 RT-ARCH17. I want to know if any of you have any knowledge or personal experiences with these routers, and which one would be best for multiple gaming devices. Thanks in advance.

ISP managed wifi router?

Does anybody have any recommendations for an ISP managed wifi router or suggestions were to look for a good alternative?

I am looking at starting to provide a managed wifi router to our consumer subscribers because (i) everybody uses wifi and (ii) most if not all support calls are about in-home wifi issues. I would like to standardize on one model with as few exceptions as possible.

Ideally the wifi router should be access technology independent, but I am also planning a CPE refresh down the road, so I am open to hearing about suitable vendors in the active Etherner and GPON area.

Requirements:

• Remote (automatic) configuration. Ideally the wifi router should be customer installable. Plug in power, plug in WAN, fetch configuration, beam wifi.
• Remote diagnostics. Speed test, traceroute, ping. Packet capture and/or ntop would be nice.
• Client monitoring. List of connected clients, wireless quality indicators, bandwidth usage. List of clients that are offline and/or were unable to connect. Alarms.
• Mesh or repeater mode. Ability to deploy more than one AP per home without hard lines.
• Remote software updates

The basic idea is to avoid truck rolls and to actually find out (and fix) what's wrong remotely despite the end user.

Any deployment engineers here?

Just curious about your experience, as I'm only about a year in. I have a couple of decades of telecommunications experience, about half of it in networking. I consider myself to be reasonably smart (but I guess everyone probably does). I work for a small company that does professional services work, mostly for other contractors, in government.

I really like the job for the most part. I travel about 40%, get to meet and work with new customers all the time, and am constantly learning new and interesting technologies. The rest of the time, I work from home and lab things up or help out with sales prospects.

The downside is that I'm very often sent to jobs that I don't really know 100% how to do, with my bosses basically giving me the "it's ok, you're smart. You'll figure it out" line. It's been a pretty big culture shock to go from a very structured corporate/SP environment to this.

It's been ok so far, but every job I go on basically feels like I have to fake it until I make it...again. That's getting to me, even as much as I'm reading and practicing, because they're all different.

Am I just not cut out for this, or is this just how it is?

I guess the upside is that I have a good personality, and usually get along pretty great with my customers.

Networking career with certificates but without a bachelor's degree?

Hello,

I'm Victor (I live in Romania, willing to relocate and work in any EU country) and I need to find out if pursuing a career in networking with certificates but without a bachelor's degree is actually possible.

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Questions:

• Will people even consider hiring me as a Network Engineer without a bachelor's degree? (please let me know in which country you work so I can get a better idea about the job market)
• Will I be able to advance and obtain better paid job positions in this field without a bachelor's degree or will I be stuck in a mediocre position regardless of number of certifications?

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Long story short:

• Attempted Automatic Control & Computer Engineering university, flunked out because of the high level of math (I come from an Economics themed high school where they only teach basic level math).
• After flunking out I worked for 1 year as a networking assistant for a relative's company until I figured out what I want to do next.

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Currently I am getting close to obtaining my CCNA certification.

I enjoy what I'm learning here and I'm thinking of obtaining more certifications in order to advance up the certification ladder (CCNP, CCIE, etc).

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Thank you for reading my post.