NetAlly If You’re a Network Engineer What Does the Future Look Like

Networks are getting harder and experienced engineers are scarce. Thomas Doumas looks at where network engineering is headed in the AI era and why the physical layer still matters. He then introduces Ally Intelligence, NetAlly’s guided troubleshooting on the handheld tester. It helps frontline techs fix problems before they escalate and helps senior engineers work faster. Doumas presented this look ahead at Networking Field Day 41 and took delegate questions throughout.

Doumas argued that the work never ends. He described large customers whose teams do nothing but replace switches as they reach the end of three-to-five-year lifecycles. He expects AI coding tools to create network problems rather than solve them, because cheaper software development will flood networks with new apps and traffic. No prompt, he noted, can produce a physical tester. Ally Intelligence is NetAlly’s response to the “wall of data” that most tools present. It takes the tester’s measurements and runs them through built-in flowcharts that point to likely root causes, walk technicians through fixes, and validate the results. Doumas said it is not a language model. It is an expert system written by NetAlly’s engineers, and it runs offline on the unit. It launched last quarter with PoE checks and rogue DHCP detection, which can show where a rogue server is plugged in. Wi-Fi troubleshooting arrives this quarter. Planned DNS tests will query both configured servers and compare their forward and reverse answers. The tester has no API of its own, but results upload to LinkLive as soon as each test finishes, or queue until a connection returns, and can be queried there.

Doumas said network engineers face only two problems: “I can’t connect” and “it’s slow.” NetAlly will keep filling in the root causes behind each one and will deliver them as software updates. It will also extend the approach to its AirCheck and EtherScope Wi-Fi tools, where he said troubleshooting is at least as complicated. Future versions may grade results against known-good baselines or configurations loaded through LinkLive, though he wants to conclude as much as possible without asking users to do extra work. On speeds beyond 100G, Doumas said NetAlly enters a market once a technology is established in customer networks, and he expects 400G to follow eventually. Delegates pressed for AI fabric testing that covers PFC, ECN, Ultra Ethernet packet spraying, and fiber connector mismatches. They argued that because idle GPUs cost organizations thousands of dollars every second, even an expensive tester would pay for itself.