Networking

This post covers network connectivity check of Contabo in India.

For a while, I have been looking for a smokeping alternative for latency monitoring from different servers spread around. While smokeping has survived well over time, in 2023 it feels like an outdated package, with limited options, lacks federation etc. This post from Karan Sharma / Zerodha on “Monitoring my home network” was exciting. His setup included a telegraph agent on a local server, Prometheus to scrap data and Grafana to draw latency data. I explored doing the same but in a distributed manner a bunch of servers spread around. After some tries, I didn’t like Telegraf. Don’t get me wrong - it’s a good “agent” to run on Linux servers but is primarily designed assuming push target against a time series database like InfluxDB which created it. I am still exploring using it for a different use case (which is pulling SNMP data from switches).

Next month is SANOG 39 in Dhaka, Bangladesh. SANOG is a South Asian Network Operator Group event and a good place for meeting a number of ISPs, telecom players, Ops team members of content networks, internet exchanges etc. Besides attending the conference, I will be doing a workshop on Network Automation. It will be a four-day workshop covering Containers, Ansible, Gitlab CI/CD pipeline and REST APIs for automation in the workflow.

Vultr has announced start of their Mumbai location on 12th of this month. It’s amazing to see them entering India. Always a good thing for growth of cloud computing on demand in India.
Besides Vultr, we have got Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Digital Ocean, Linode, Oracle Cloud etc in India. I heard OVH also planning for Indian location and so have to see how that goes.

In meanwhile, let’s have a quick check on Vultr’s network connectivity. I just created a Virtual machine in Mumbai to look at the routing and connectivity. I got following for my test VM:

A developer friend recently asked me about the design of redundancy on servers. He had a valid point - running BGP can be tricky and expensive since most colo & datacenter host would offer simple static routing & usually with just a couple of IP addresses. Furthermore, due to IPv4 exhaustion, the prices of /24 have shot off pretty massively. On top of this burning, a /24 on single or multiple servers is also a questionable design practice unless one of hosting & selling hundreds of virtual machines on those servers.