Networking Intermediate

What is Network Monitoring?

The practice of continuously observing network infrastructure to detect failures, performance degradation, and security threats.

Network monitoring tracks bandwidth utilization, packet loss, latency, device health, and security events across network infrastructure. Tools include Nagios, Zabbix, PRTG, and LibreNMS for infrastructure monitoring; Wireshark and tcpdump for packet analysis; NetFlow/sFlow for traffic analysis; and SNMP for device metrics. Modern monitoring systems use agents or agentless collection, define thresholds for alerts, generate performance reports, and support auto-remediation. Effective monitoring covers availability (is it up?), performance (is it fast?), and security (is it safe?) across all network layers.

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Network Security Basics

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Network Security Fundamentals

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Linux Networking Fundamentals

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Token Bucket Algorithm

A rate limiting algorithm that allows burst traffic by accumulating tokens at a fixed rate and consuming them per request.

A compact method for specifying IP addresses and their associated routing prefix using a slash followed by the prefix length.

DNS (Domain Name System)

A hierarchical naming system that translates human-readable domain names into IP addresses.

A server that sits between clients and backend servers, forwarding client requests and returning server responses on their behalf.

DNS Record Types

Different types of DNS entries that map domain names to various information like IP addresses, mail servers, and verification strings.

A logical division of an IP network into smaller segments to improve performance, security, and management.

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