Network engineering continued

 This is a continuation of the earlier posts starting with this one: http://ravinote.blogspot.com/2020/09/best-practice-from-networking.html

41)  Catalogs:  Physical organization does not always have to directly co-relate with the way users save them. A catalog is a great example of utilizing the existing organization to serve various ways in which the content is looked up or correlated. Moreover, custom tags can help increase the ways in which the files can be managed and maintained. While lookups have translated to queries, content indexers have provided an alternate way to look up data. Here we refer to organization of metadata so that the network architecture can be separated from the logical organization and lookups. SNMP is credited to have formed a comprehensive metadata for the network but its use with products like Clearwire failed because there was no consensus on using it.

42) System metadata – Metadata is not specific only to the network artifacts from the user. Every layer maintains entities and bookkeeping in the immediately lower layer and these are often just as useful to query as some of the queries of the overall system. This metadata is internal and for system purposes only. Consequently, they are the source of truth for the rules in the system whether it is for routing or for interfaces.

43) User metadata – We referred to metadata for user objects. However, such metadata is usually in the form of predetermined fields that the system exposes. In some cases, users can add more labels and tags and this customization is referred to as user metadata. User metadata helps in cases outside the system where users want to group their content that can then be used in classification and data mining. Network does not need to remain hidden. A transparent peer to peer network allows customers to choose their own peers.

44) Connection pooling - a pool of open connections is efficient. These connections are already open and there is no overhead associated with using one. Each such pre-opened connection is ready for data transfer and is not considered dirty from previous use. Connection pooling can improve on overheads by as much as 50%.

45) Static content – is always preferable over dynamic data because a "learning mechanism" could allow clients to track the objects that are requested from a specific site and accelerate future requests by using the learned information and pre-fetching associated content. In addition, the learned information can be sent in parallel for normally sequential data, creating more optimization benefits.

46) Packet capture, route tracers and other tools -  Every protocol has a sequence of request responses and their capture can be useful for troubleshooting at lower levels. The use of appropriate tools for appropriate job helps reduce cost of investigations. At higher levels, packets and logs entries can be collected and analyzed as machine data with tools that support user interface which take queries.