It’s been a while since my last post — life and work have both been full. Today, I’m diving into one of the most quietly critical aspects of network design: time synchronization. Specifically, how to design NTP within an enterprise network and how to think about time zones when correlating logs.
We'll look at two main topics in this post: designing NTP (Network Time Protocol) and managing time zone display in logs.
As the AI movement continues to expand its reach into the networking space, the need for an appropriate source of truth for network data becomes more critical than ever. What I have been seeing so far in the industry for networking and AI has been a lot of working on the individual devices one by one. But when looking at leveraging AI for the network, I believe it is best to look at the network as a whole. And that is where the Source of Truth data being stored in Nautobot is going to provide the right information about the network and the relationships between pieces of information - AI thrives on context, and relationships provide that context for more accurate insights and actions.