December 7th, 2007 by James Cerwinski
Categories: Network Monitoring
Monitoring Networked Printers with Raritan CommandCenter NOC
CC-NOC provides real-time information about network enabled printers by leveraging the best attributes of synthetic transactions and SNMP. A highly configurable notification capability enables administrators to be informed via email, pager or mobile phone about printer status changes and problems.
Information about any SNMP enabled node is retrieved with standard MIB (Management Information Base) data and product specific MIBs. Standard MIB information retrieved By CC-NOC includes MIB II (RFC 1213) and host resources MIB (RFC 1514) which provides network performance statistics and host computer information respectively. In addition to these standard MIBs, the CC-NOC also retrieves device specific MIBs which allow for detailed alerts to be sent to network administrators. The user has the ability to compile new or updated MIBs directly into CC-NOC.
The CC-NOC retrieves MIB (RFC 1759) data providing important printer details. This MIB allows alerts, specifying severity level, description, and other pertinent information to be sent to the administrator for both critical and non-critical conditions. Critical alerts are triggered by events in which printing has stopped such as: out of paper, toner empty, and output bin full conditions. Non-critical alerts are triggered by events that may lead to printer being stopped such as: input media low, toner low, and output bin nearly full. Priorities such as normal, warning status, operator call and service call are given to each group of alerts. These capabilities enable a network administrator to achieve the highest level of availability.
November 29th, 2007 by James Cerwinski
Categories: Network Monitoring
Network Monitoring Reports
A list of my Top Five Network Monitoring Reports - No IT organization should do without.
Network Report Card - Provides an overview of how your network performed in terms of availability, security grade and network traffic over a certain period of time. This report should be automatically generated and distributed on a scheduled basis.
Inventory Report - Should automatically discover, update and list the hardware and software in your network. The hardware includes - CPU, RAM, Hard Disk, etc. The software includes application name and version. This should include a complete listing as well as the ability to run a delta view to show the changes between two specific dates.
Performance Report - Provides the current status and trend lines for hard disk space, memory utilization and interface traffic.
Network Traffic Report - Network traffic should include top talkers, top sessions, most resolved DNS names, top web sites visited and traffic by application protocol.
Software Application Report - Should enable you to find the nodes that either have or don’t have a combination of software applications.
Let me know your thoughts…. add to the list
November 16th, 2007 by James Cerwinski
Categories: Network Monitoring
Cisco Network Monitoring
Network monitoring toolset that monitors the performance and availability of your heterogeneous network - keeping close watch on your Cisco Network Elements, Windows® Systems, Linux®/UNIX® Servers, and other network devices such as firewalls and network printers. If an outage is detected, or a threshold is crossed, the appropriate staff members can be alerted with e-mail or pager-based notifications. Problems can then be corrected before an outage occurs, increasing up-time and enhancing your company’s productivity. Escalation groups can also be configured, ensuring that problems receive prompt attention.
Provides Enhanced Support for Cisco Network Devices
- Automatic network node and service discovery
- Availability polling via synthetic transactions
- Performance data collection, thresholding, and reporting
- CPU Utilization
- Interface traffic
- Memory Utilization
- Failures
- Automatic daily inventory discover and reporting via SNMP Host Resource MIB and MIB II
- Ability to receive SNMP traps and syslog events.
- Ability to import new MIBs
- Consolidates and reports Cisco NetFlow traffic data
- Data from main and remote sites
- Traffic logging, analysis and reporting
- Most frequently requested web sites and domain names
- Top IP node talkers
- Top IP node to node sessions
- TCP/IP flows
- Automatically creates Network Topology Map
- Consolidate event logs for easy search and reporting
- Notification via email or mobile device for important events.
Free version now available for download to monitor five Cisco nodes and five Windows servers
October 31st, 2007 by J
Categories: Development & Testing, Network Monitoring
Go Pack!
A few of us here in the development team are graduates of NC State University. We are excited to hear that the “Lone Wolf” is continuing to qualify for the Urban Challenge Final Event at the DARPA Grand Challenge. Be sure to follow them at the Insight Racing Blog. The finalists will be announced Thursday. Eliminated yesterday were some great competitors:
Georgia Tech/SAIC Sting Racing, Atlanta, GA
Ody-Era, Kokomo, IN
Princeton, Princeton, NJ
SciAutonics/Auburn Engineering, Thousand Oaks, CA
Team Berlin, Houston, TX
University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT
In a lot of ways we face some similar challenges. We send our NOCs out into a variety of environments, from pristine “by the book” networks to test labs where devices are expected to malfunction. We must ensure that the NOC operates properly in all situations. This is similar to the Lone Wolf’s release into the DARPA Courses, where the Lone Wolf must drive the route without any advance knowledge of the traffic situation layout or route.
I’m not going to brag and say that the NOC is equivalent to these vehicles. The NOC has a much easier job. The Lone Wolf drives because its sensors tell it where the road is, what the traffic signals say, where pedestrians are, where other vehicles are, etc. The sensors provide data regarding distance, speed, etc. to allow the driving algorithms to operate.
The NOC is more like the sensors of the Lone Wolf. By providing information about outages, service performance, traffic, etc. to the you, it apprises you of the road ahead. You can then make the decision to buy new equipment, move a virtual machine, etc. based on this data.
Go Lone Wolf! Go Pack! Congratulations on making it to the Urban Challenge Semifinals.
J
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.
October 25th, 2007 by Dennis Ti
Categories: Network Monitoring
Where is your traffic headed?
I remember the first time I saw the CC-NOC in action. A test unit had come up to our corporate HQ to give us a chance to play around with it. The next thing I knew, we were all crowded around a desk, looking at a breakdown of what kind of traffic our network was generating. We knew which one of our machines was generating the most traffic…and that streaming music sites were very popular on our network (we counted 3 that day on our Network Report card).
Well, that wasn’t really a shocker. But it was exciting to see traffic analysis handled like that, and to me it’s still the first image my mind comes up with when I think about CC-NOC’s impressive network monitoring capabilities. I’m sure some of you out there have had similar experiences, so I put this question to you: Where is your traffic headed? What are people on your network visiting? Is there anything interesting you didn’t think you’d see?
October 17th, 2007 by James Cerwinski
Categories: Network Monitoring
Network Monitoring
The following web site by Stanford Linear Accelerator Center provides a comprehensive list of network monitoring tools. I suggest network administrators start their product searches on this site to find out the available network monitoring solutions.
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
October 8th, 2007 by Dennis Ti
Categories: IT Admin, Network Monitoring
Roadmap for Network Monitoring Reports
I had the opportunity last week to “get out of the office” and visit a customer who was very excited about the new open database access capability in CC-NOC 6.0. He downloaded the virtual appliance and, within a day, had started to setup a number of queries through Crystal Reports for reports he planned to write. Let me tell you, it is certainly nice to watch someone be enthusiastic about a new feature your team has developed. My particular role was to draft the documentation including a data schema guide. After all, what good is it to open your database unless you provide customers and partners with all the documentation they need to effectively implement it.
This particular customer had to write monthly reports for the company executives, correlating data points that the executives wanted to see. Much of that data has been available across the various reports in CC-NOC, but he wasn’t about to get the executives to log in to the appliance and leaf through a few pages each month. Now that we’ve opened our database to ODBC requests, he uses Crystal Reports to query and layout the report exactly as his executives want the information. He has turned data into useful information.
Discussing the new database access with this customer was a very good use of my time. I would love to hear your thoughts on the topic - do you find yourself (or your team) writing reports regularly? What data are you most interested in? What queries have you come-up with that turns IT data into information?
As always, you can comment directly here on the blog, or visit our forums and leave a post for the rest of the community and the CC-NOC staff to comment on.
With a lack of coffee,
Dennis Ti
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 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.
