I’ve been perplexed with a problem lately as a network engineer. Obviously the use of Public/Hybrid clouds from third party providers causes a lack of any sort of visibility for a network engineers.

The question is…how do we…as network engineers gain the visibility necessary to see the health of the cloud and performance within the network.

Here are a few ideas that one can utilize to start gaining more visibility for an engineer to help with performance metrics and troubleshooting:

1. Monitor all server equipment nic cards.
2. Smokeping between different servers
3. Monitor local bandwidth going out to the cloud
4. Trending reports will tell you if the cloud has issues
5. Have a Network Host in the cloud that is dedicated to running latency, jitter numbers utilizing smokeping

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