Network monitoring evolution
As already mentioned, modern network observability has evolved from network monitoring, a practice that has been in place for several decades. Before delving into the new approach it introduces, it’s important to review what has been effective so far and to understand the trends and requirements that have driven its transformation.
What has worked so far
Networks have been monitored to understand their status since the beginning. ARPANET (which stands for Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), the first packet-switched network started in 1966, had the Interface Message Processor (IMP) protocol, which provided a few monitoring features. Fast-forwarding some years to the rise of TCP/IP networks, in 1988, the SNMP was defined by the IETF (its last version is SNMPv3) to address this need.
SNMP provides a mechanism to manage networks, but it has been mostly used to monitor networks, and not to manage configuration changes (which have been...
