# SAMURAI Engineering Blog

> Practical write-ups on multi-vendor networks, fabric design, change detection, and the engineering behind running thousands of endpoints through one pipeline.

## Posts
- [Firewall audit checklist: 15 checks before your next compliance review](https://nometa.az/en/blog/firewall-audit-checklist.md) (2026-07-19): A practical, vendor-neutral checklist for auditing firewall configuration: rule hygiene, effective access, NAT exposure, change control, and the evidence auditors actually ask for.
- [Choosing the best network monitoring tools for multi-vendor networks](https://nometa.az/en/blog/best-network-monitoring-tools.md) (2026-06-11): An honest guide to SolarWinds, PRTG, Zabbix, LibreNMS, and Nagios, and where a self-hosted multi-vendor platform fits.
- [How we detect changes without relying on audit logs](https://nometa.az/en/blog/change-detection-without-audit-logs.md) (2026-05-20): How stripping volatile fields and hashing the rest eliminates false-positive diffs, and catches the changes audit logs never record.
- [Multi-vendor path tracing: the hard parts](https://nometa.az/en/blog/multi-vendor-path-tracing.md) (2026-05-06): Tracing a packet across IOS, NX-OS, and PAN-OS means reconciling different ACL syntaxes, route table formats, and zero shared conventions.
- [Correlating thousands of endpoints without a CMDB](https://nometa.az/en/blog/endpoint-correlation-without-cmdb.md) (2026-04-22): MAC tables, ARP, DHCP snooping, CDP/LLDP, 802.1X, and APIC hosts: stitched together in the right order, they replace a stale spreadsheet.
- [APIC clustering: failover without the flapping](https://nometa.az/en/blog/apic-clustering-failover.md) (2026-04-08): Configurable thresholds and cooldown windows keep your Cisco ACI fabric monitored even when controllers go down.
- [From six browser tabs to one dashboard](https://nometa.az/en/blog/six-tabs-to-one-dashboard.md) (2026-03-25): The operational pain that started SAMURAI, and the design decisions that let a single read-only surface replace APIC, Panorama, FMC, ISE, and a stack of SSH terminals.
- [Deploying SAMURAI in air-gapped environments](https://nometa.az/en/blog/air-gapped-deployment.md) (2026-03-11): A single docker load, an offline IEEE OUI database, and TLS that assumes self-signed certificates: everything you need to run SAMURAI without internet access.

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Canonical page: https://nometa.az/en/blog/
Part of SAMURAI, a self-hosted, multi-vendor network monitoring & security platform. Overview: https://nometa.az/llms.txt
Contact: info@nometa.az · Docker Hub: https://hub.docker.com/r/beyrak44/samurai