Network Monitoring News

October 31st, 2007 by James Cerwinski

Categories: Asset Management, IT Admin, Network Monitoring

Improving Incident Management in an SMB

According to ITIL, An IT incident is an event which is not part of standard IT operations which causes or may cause, an interruption to, or a reduction in, the quality of service. Your objective is to restore an incident to full service as soon as possible.

Your problem in meeting this objective can be broken down into the following three areas.

Detection time - Don’t know about an incident until a user complains
Diagnosis time - Lack of current information about your network
Remediation time - Can’t remotely access a node to restore it to service

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Your solution should include:

Ability to improve detection time by:

Polling for incidents via synthetic transactions
Event consolidation and monitoring
Monitoring performance thresholds
Monitoring performance trends

Ability to improve diagnosis time by:

Providing a notification that will inform you of an incident before your user does
A page that automatically collects and consolidates what has been happing to a certain node or service in terms of events and performance.
A page that also consolidates current configuration and recent changes to a node in terms of software and hardware.

Ability to improve remediation time

Anytime, anywhere out of band access via KVM/IP
“Virtual Media” capability to remotely mount drives to install software and run diagnostic tests

This is a good first step. There is always more you can do but I will save that for a future blog entry.

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October 16th, 2007 by James Cerwinski

Categories: Asset Management, CommandCenter NOC, Network Monitoring

Release 6.0 is Now Available from the Download Server

Release 6.0 is now available from the download server.

It includes the following new capabilities:

At a glance view of your total network and outages - Network Topology Map - The system will now automatically discover your network, provide the interconnection topology in Map form, provide red light notifications for outages, and the ability to drill down for more detail on the outage and the node.

Presents the most important notifications - Event Correlation - Presents the root cause event or notification and suppresses secondary events.

Enhanced data export - ODBC access - Enables data export to ODBC capable systems. For example you can now use Crystal reports or SQL to access the data in the CC-NOC and create custom reports.

For more detail read the release notes.

Set your CC-NOC to look for new updates. If it finds 6.0.5 follow the instructions to install. If it does not find the new release it is most likely that your CC-NOC is not registered in our download server. In that case, provide the following information to our tech support and they will help you.

tech-ccnoc@raritan.com

CC-NOC Model

Serial number

MAC Address

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September 27th, 2007 by James Cerwinski

Categories: Development & Testing, Asset Management, IT Admin, Virtualization, Network Monitoring

VMware Infrastructure Software Development Kit (SDK)

We have posted a number of articles that highlight virtualization’s high value proposition. Very few things in life provide such gain with no pain. As pointed out in our Georgia-Pacific article, one of virtualization’s main pain is in the area of IT operations management. Our particular area of expertise and interest is in IT Asset Management and Network Monitoring. We are excited about the opportunity to discover, track, and monitor those virtual machines as they are created and zipped around from host to host at lightning speed. The rapid creation and movement of systems presents new challenges for IT operations management systems. Correctly leveraging and implementing the right set of management APIs can make the job much easier.

Fortunately, we have one of the best operations system interface engineers in the industry. Rakesk Bisaria has designed and implemented many mission critical systems which inter-operate to provide seamless flow-through operations. He has submitted the following article for me to post.

By Rakesh Bisaria;

VMware SDK API - The VMware SDK provides a comprehensive set of services that ISVs can utilize to build client applications that manage the VMware Infrastructure. The The VMware Infrastructure (VI) SDK supports a VI API which is available as a Web Service programming interface based on WSDL, SOAP, and HTTP standards. The VI API provides access to VMware Infrastructure resources and services thereby facilitating integration of independent Management Applications. The VI API is supported on VMware ESX Server and VirtualCenter products.

VMware Infrastructure - consists of a suite of products and features that allow creation of Data Center Operations Applications. Some of the building blocks are:

VMwareCenter – VMwareCenter is the central management application that automates and optimizes the management of VMware IT infrastructure.

VMware Hosts - Servers (ESX Server. VMware Server) that host Virtual Machines (VM).

VMware High Availability (HA) – High Availability or fail-over capability for Virtual Machines that eliminates the need for a dedicated standby server and allows a VM to be available across the virtualized IT infrastructure.

VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) – Dynamic load balancing and resource distribution by moving Virtual Machines (VMotion) to realize optimal performance across the virtualized environment.

VMware VMotion – Automatic move of VM from one physical server to another with no impact on the end users.

VI SDK Features & Services

The VI SDK supports the following Host Management and Virtualized Environment Management functions:

Host Management Operations - Following are some host management operations supported by the SDK VI API:

Reboot or Shutdown a host
Connect or disconnect a host from VirtualCenter
Create or remove datastore from a host
Configure the networking and storage systems attached to a host

Virtualized Environment Management Operations - Following are some Virtualized Environment management operations supported by the SDK VI API:

Virtual Machine Creation and Deletion
Virtual Machine Provisioning
Virtual Machine Inventory
Virtual Machine Migration (VMotion)
Virtual Machine Performance Data
Distributed Resource Schedule (DRS) Services
High Availability Services

VMware SDK Development Environment – Following are the VM SDK Development Environment components:

· VMware SDK provided WSDL file

· Web Service Development Environment: Examples: Apache Axis, Microsoft Visual Studio .Net and .Net Framework

Over the next few weeks I will publish additional thoughts on this topic. In the mean time please provide your thoughts and comments.

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September 24th, 2007 by James Cerwinski

Categories: Asset Management, CommandCenter NOC, Network Monitoring

Network Monitoring for SMB by C&S Networking Solutions, Inc.

The following write-up was submitted to me for posting by Sky Caserotti. Sky is the president of C&S Networking Solutions, Inc. and he wanted to share his story about bringing affordable network monitoring to the SMB market.

When I first heard about the CC-NOC, I was as skeptical as the next person, especially after hearing about “New Mouse Traps” for 20+ years in the industry.

After we researched the product, we quickly discovered that Raritan had run across something that was truly new and exciting. By using industry tested tools and applications, there was finally a toolset that brought the best of the best together for an unparalleled coexistence and integration.

Soon, our company, C&S Networking Solutions, Inc., in Indianapolis, embraced this technology and realized that, finally, a vendor had created a product that provided Network & Systems Monitoring, Alerting, IDS, Vulnerability Assessment, Traffic Analysis, and Asset Management that was amazingly scaleable and customizable.

After we’d partnered with our local Raritan distributor (Midwest Computer Accessories) on several Enterprise and Medium business deployments, we decided to take this product to the SMB market. By using our existing customer base which consists mainly of Not-for-Profits and 50 seats or less companies, we’re deploying the Raritan CC-NOC virtual appliance as fast as we can get PC’s built.

Our customers are finding that they can now have high-end Managed Services at their disposal for a fraction of what this might cost by outsourcing the process. It’s also been a fantastic catalyst for revenue generation. For my existing customers, they’re paying a small monthly fee to have us provide metrics and monitoring services. Some others are simply having us implement this for their overburdened IT staff at a reasonable installation cost.

As we move forward with this product and continue to work with Raritan, it has become clear that we’ve taken our business into a market that’s been vacant for far too long.

C&S Networking Solutions, Inc
5611 S. Meridian, Suite C
Indianapolis, IN 46217
O. 317-638-7719
F. 317-781-7990

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September 20th, 2007 by James Cerwinski

Categories: Asset Management, IT Admin, Virtualization

Georgia-Pacific’s Virtualization Expirience

Brad Wagner from Georgia-Pacific presented about their VMware(r) virtualization program. The following are the highlights:

Original business case was approved based upon server consolidation at a 5 to 1 ratio.

Results:

Containment(rapid upgrade & deployment) has proven to be a valuable benefit not listed in the original business case
Actual consolidation is at a 10 to 1 ratio. 100 ESX hosts supporting over 1000 guest machines
G-P adds 100 new OSs a year - 80% are deployed as virtual machines. 20% require new hw. Long term goal is to implement 100% of wintel requests as virtual machines.
Cap spending has dropped
Provisioning time has been reduced dramatically

The main constraint is managing the rapidly growing environment. The following are some of the pain points mentioned by Brad(not in any particular order).