Guide2026-06-11
Choosing the best network monitoring tools for multi-vendor networks
An honest guide to SolarWinds, PRTG, Zabbix, LibreNMS, and Nagios, and where a self-hosted multi-vendor platform fits.
5 min readRead →
// FIELD NOTES
The SAMURAI Blog
Practical writeups on multi-vendor networks, fabric design, change detection, and the engineering behind running thousands of endpoints through one pipeline.
Guide2026-07-19
Firewall audit checklist: 15 checks before your next compliance review
A practical, vendor-neutral checklist for auditing firewall configuration: rule hygiene, effective access, NAT exposure, change control, and the evidence auditors actually ask for.
BA
Beyrak A.
Founder · Lead Engineer
Engineering2026-05-20
How we detect changes without relying on audit logs
How stripping volatile fields and hashing the rest eliminates false-positive diffs, and catches the changes audit logs never record.
4 min readRead →
Deep Dive2026-05-06
Multi-vendor path tracing: the hard parts
Tracing a packet across IOS, NX-OS, and PAN-OS means reconciling different ACL syntaxes, route table formats, and zero shared conventions.
4 min readRead →
Architecture2026-04-22
Correlating thousands of endpoints without a CMDB
MAC tables, ARP, DHCP snooping, CDP/LLDP, 802.1X, and APIC hosts: stitched together in the right order, they replace a stale spreadsheet.
4 min readRead →
Operations2026-04-08
APIC clustering: failover without the flapping
Configurable thresholds and cooldown windows keep your Cisco ACI fabric monitored even when controllers go down.
4 min readRead →
Product2026-03-25
From six browser tabs to one dashboard
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.
4 min readRead →
Operations2026-03-11
Deploying SAMURAI in air-gapped environments
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.
4 min readRead →
Field notes, straight to your inbox.
Deep dives on multi-vendor architecture, fabric design, change-detection algorithms, and the engineering behind SAMURAI.