The following post is by Opmantek. We thank Opmantek for being a sponsor.
As organizations manage increasingly interdependent network infrastructure in an increasingly chaotic world, how can you, as a network operations professional, maintain control of your network without losing control of your time?
The answers are: network visibility, flexible event management, and powerful automation. All of this is possible within Opmantek’s network management platform. The software streamlines workflows and lets network engineers and operators accomplish more work with fewer distractions, allowing them to go home on time.
The Importance Of Visibility
We often hear from network engineers that they don’t know what devices are on the network or where they’re located. This lack of visibility introduces security risks and increases Mean Time To Recovery (MTTR). The ability to see as much of the network as possible on a single dashboard allows for fast response times when you and your team need them most.
The robust network visualization tools built into Opmantek’s opCharts and opEvents give you the ability to see a network and react in real time to precisely what’s happening with confidence. That’s essential for daily operations and in emergencies. For example, did you know that storm-related outages cost the U.S. economy up to $55 billion every year? When a major storm like Hurricane Sandy blasts through your infrastructure overnight, you’ll be able to identify the points of failure and take action fast.
Extensible Multi-Vendor Visibility
Opmantek’s foundational open-source NMIS software, along with the opEvents module, lets you detect and act on events coming from any device on the network. NMIS has out-of-the-box support for thousands of multi-vendor devices and the ability to customize existing models and create new models for any device that supports SNMP, NetConf, RESTful APIs, and virtually any protocol with its pluggable architecture.
The powerful engine in opEvents natively handles SNMP traps, syslog, and just about any form of log data. It supports mainstream vendors such as Cisco, Juniper, and many more. Customers can also create new vendor and product support without needing a developer.
Detect Conditions Based On Alerts And Thresholds
Opmantek collects the data you need to know that things are operating normally, and can alert you to abnormal events. The software polls devices continuously and can raise events based on user-defined conditions or performance thresholds to ensure instant visibility.
Establishing and defining thresholds for the collected data, as well as creating alerts when a detected condition changes, gives you a better understanding of your network environment. Threshold alerts are a proactive mechanism for getting in front of network issues before the business is severely affected. For example, when a router starts dropping packets, you can fix it before it becomes a serious problem.
To ensure that systems are performing normally, Opmantek has tools to dynamically baseline performance and send alerts about abnormal metrics. This capability is especially important in the dynamic environments network engineers find themselves working in today.
Network Topology And Multi-Tenancy
Having a real-time, end-to-end view of your network topology accelerates root-cause analysis and can reduce organizational complexity. For instance, you may want to visualize several customer nodes with overlapping IP addresses or just different departments within your firm. In addition, you may want to see each device’s status in green, yellow, or red. Opmantek’s opCharts gives you the ability to display multi-tenancy views defined in NMIS and the flexibility to organize your topology and hierarchy as you see fit. This lets you identify points of failure by network position just as easily as geographical location.
“See” The Network Through Event Management
Opmantek’s suite of products prioritizes and visualizes critical events, helping you and your team see through network noise and putting essential information at your fingertips. Let’s look at four of Optmantek’s network management capabilities.
Source: Opmantek
1. Event Filtering, Suppression, And De-duplication
Without a powerful and customizable network monitoring tool, constant alerts, messages, and events quickly become noise, making it hard to determine the most important information. Opmantek lets you customize your alerts to your specific needs to ensure that important messages are received. Opmantek’s opEvents, for example, can automatically detect, correlate, and consolidate alerts for easier identification and triage.
2. Event Policies, Escalation, And Notification
Identifying meaningful network events is the easy part; in a crisis, the important part is the response. Within NMIS and opEvents, when a critical alert is received, it is highlighted in the GUI and messaging. Email notifications can be sent to the network team, and other business escalations can activate, all while it opens an incident ticket in your service desk or ticketing system.
3. Event Acknowledgement And Actions
Event action visibility is essential to know how a crisis is being handled and by whom. When you’re dealing with several points of failure at once, you need to ensure that each point is addressed promptly. Within NMIS and opEvents, alerts can be acknowledged by operators or through an automated response. Automating actions provides consistency to problem-solving on your network and frees up you and your team to spend valuable time dealing with more complex and exciting problems (or even a little planning).
4. Event Visualization
Everyone in this industry has been blurry-eyed and overwhelmed by event logs. But when you’re facing a business-impacting issue, you don’t want to be overwhelmed. Network visualization and clear event logs are the fastest way to understand these occurrences, intuitively, in real time.
The True Value Of Operational Automation
The most powerful and underutilized tool in modern network management is automation. Given the complexity of today’s networks, automating tasks and actions is critical to minimizing MTTR. For example, automatable processes such as locational correlation functionality, are essential for diagnosing how a network has been affected by a crisis such as an infrastructure-damaging storm — helping you work out where the points of failure are to coordinate software fixes and hardware replacements as necessary.
Automation removes a lot of the guesswork, ensuring accuracy and consistency and allowing these corrective actions to be integrated with processes and tools you already use, such as your ticketing system. Within Opmantek’s software suite, we have a capability called Operational Process Automation (OPA). This capability is about putting in place the most effective systems and workflows possible to automate repetitive operational tasks—such as troubleshooting steps—to improve efficiency and ensure operational consistency.
Source: Opmantek
OPA has three key steps: Detect, Diagnose, and Act.
- Detect: You need to detect incidents or changes that require actions by processing the data from the environment (alerts, events), looking for symptoms that indicate operational risk.
- Diagnose: Determine what steps are normally, and sometimes routinely, taken to diagnose and troubleshoot the detected incidents or changes. Document the troubleshooting workflow based on the information collected, identifying tasks necessary to view and ultimately resolve the incident or remediate a change.
- Act: Determine what actions are required to resolve the incident or change: Identify common tasks and steps to complete, based on the troubleshooting workflow. Implement workarounds and/or corrective actions to resolve incidents.
Operational Process Automation not only improves your mean time to service restoration, it also drives down the cost of service delivery and fosters higher network availability.
Empowering Operators With Delegation
Opmantek Virtual Operator is central to operational automation, providing the ability to delegate some of the activities generally done by network engineers to the network operations team. Opmantek calls this operational delegation. Network engineers can define the action which can be carried out and on which devices, all without needing to give staff direct access to the devices. Instead, the work is delegated to on-duty operations teams to get the job done when it needs to, allowing the engineer to get home.
Try It For Yourself
So how can you, as a network engineer, maintain control of your network without losing control of your time? With help that involves having a wholly integrated, powerful tool that allows you to see and receive meaningful information from your network, allowing faster decision-making and then delegating and automating the tasks necessary to ensure optimal network performance.
Do all this, and you’ll increase your productivity, as well as that of your technical and operations teams, producing consistent and accurate results, increasing customer satisfaction, and, ultimately, allowing you to leave work at 5 pm.
Try Opmantek for yourself with a 100-node license good for one year.