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Entuity for the Expert
You have worked with network management software for years, so you know what's possible and what to expect.Click on one of the scenarios below to see how your day would change with Entuity.
Entuity Eye of the Storm for Fault Management You are a service manager in the network operation center. You receive a phone call from the financial controller from one of your field offices, one week before quarter close, and he says that his system is unacceptably slow. This is typical - the user says that "the network is slow" at a remote site, but you're in the NOC. How can you troubleshoot this? It could be an application or server issue, even though the user thinks it's the network. Once again, the network is "guilty before being proven innocent." Fortunately, you were already prepared for the call. The EYE Status Summary gives you a dashboard view of the overall health of your network.
You know it can't be the switch the server is plugged into, because you would have received an alarm from EYE, showing packet corruption on the port the server is plugged into, looking like this:
You didn't receive an alarm from the server or the application running on the server, so you know it can't be the server or the application causing the problem. So you need to look at that controller's specific machine to chase down the problem. The Find Tool allows you to do this quickly.
Now let's look at this user's traffic and fault patterns.
You check the settings of his switch port, and you see that it is set for Full 100, which is the standard for your organization. However, this user has recently upgraded his network PCMCIA card driver, because of VPN incompatibilities, and that has reset the NIC to auto duplex, causing a negotiation mismatch. There's your problem. You call the local support tech to go to the local workstation and change the setting to Full 100. Entuity Eye of the Storm for Inventory and Resource ManagementAn important issue for proper network management is to know the inter-relationships between applications, servers, and the network. By having full visibility into layers 2, 3, and 4, you can quickly identify which applications are dependent on which equipment, allowing you to prioritize issues more effectively. As with most NOCs the top priority is to keep the most critical applications up and running. EYE shows you the inter-relationships between the network, the servers, and the applications that depend on them. Particularly notable is that EYE's discovery of the physical location of applications is agent-less.
Furthermore, EYE delivers impact analysis information - showing you what needs to be fixed, and helping you decide in what order to fix it.
Beyond issue resolution and trouble-shooting, EYE provides you a wealth of inventory information. For example, suppose that your vendor requires a serial number in order to issue an RMA for a faulty piece of equipment that is not local to your facility. That equipment is down, so how would you get the serial number without hopping on a plane to get it? EYE already has the serial number recorded - just find the device and look it up.
The inventory report can also be used to quickly identify which equipment needs to be updated. Suppose you need to meet a mandate to maintain a certain quality of service. This necessitates updating some IOS revisions on some devices on the network. By looking at an EYE report, you can tell every piece of equipment that will be affected. This saves you hours of tedious work. Here's another use for an EYE's inventory management: suppose, for example, that you need to expand a facility at 375 Park Avenue because your company is moving a new group there. It is assumed that you will need to buy new switches to support them. However, the inventory report shows that you have 67 spare ports you can use. Buying more switches is unnecessary - you've just saved the company some money. Entuity Eye of the Storm for Configuration ManagementExperience tells you - along with every industry expert - that the overwhelming majority of network problems result from inappropriate configuration changes. You know that you need to better automate your configuration management process, but although the full NCCM solutions on the market seem helpful, they require more effort than you can spare at this time. By having an automated backup process and active alerting to any changes in configuration, you can quickly decide if any changes are detrimental and fix issues more effectively. The EYE Configuration Monitor offers just the functionality you need without the burden of complicated policies, uncontrolled remediation, or extensive implementations. EYE's first line of defense is scheduled or on-demand archiving of configurations for managed devices.
Configurations are saved to a specified location on the network for safe and secure back up, enabling the fast retrieval of valid device configurations when required. Historic details are also logged to facilitate compliance verification. You will also spend less time worrying about configuration changes on your network because Configuration Monitor automatically compares running versus saved configurations, searching for significant device changes or policy non-compliance that may adversely affect device or network performance. Changes discovered to be non-compliant or different to previous files versions are automatically alerted through the EYE Bulletin Board, saving time and effort on this important task.
Prompted by real-time alerts, EYE has another trick up it's sleeve to save you time and aggravation. A graphical compare launched from the Bulletin Board can quickly and visually compare identified configurations. With an easy to read interface, you can quickly establish changes, deletions, and additions – each presented with a different color - quickly indicating if corrective action is warranted.
EYE Configuration Monitor ideally provides a fast and effective way to ensure that all device configuration changes are tracked and monitored to ensure a consistent, stable and manageable network environment. Entuity Eye of the Storm for Performance ManagementPerformance management is another important capability of the Entuity network management suite.
Suppose you need to deploy new services, perhaps in support of a new CRM application, to all of your offices. You have been instructed to do so at minimal incremental expense. You suspect that the network is going to be severely impacted by the new application, so your strategy will be to rationalize existing WAN bandwidth.
It shows you that you have a link in one office that is need of an upgrade, but at the same time, you have links in two other offices that are underutilized. So you contact your carrier and change the service plan to optimize current levels of service. Once again, you have proactively addressed your system needs while responding to business requirements. Entuity Eye of the Storm for Flow-based Performance Management
One of the interfaces in your London location seems to have a high amount of outtraffic utilization. Using the convieient hyperlinks in the EYE NetFlow Analyzer, you can launch the Network Snapshot for closer inspection.
At a glance, you notice on device in particular represents a high percentage of the overall traffic. With another simple click, you can drill down to a traffic report on the device in question.
You can clearly see the 95th percentile traffic and the times where the peaks are occuring. This corresponds with the frequency at which your user is complaining, so you are on the right track. One more hyperlink click should do the trick.
Within minutes, the EYE NetFlow Analyser has given you the flow-based performance insight you need to make a well informed decision and improve your network's performance. Managing Multiple Customers and NetworksSpread too thin. It doesn't take long before your ever-growing network responsibilities have you feeling just that way. Although geographically distributed customers, offices, or divisions can stretch the bounds of complexity, proactively managing them and keeping all your customers happy does not have to test your nerve. With a full range of graphically concise dashboards including convenient hyperlinks, EYE gives you the tools to easily keep your distributed and complex networks properly provisioned and efficiently performing.
You start your day by having a quick look at the EYE Server Status dashboard. Here color-coded status indicators and tool-tips give a quick indication to overall performance, availability, and events on all the different customers or networks in your EYE estate. Although network availability for all your customers is at 100%, you notice a few critical events for one network that deserve investigation.
To better understand the server in question, you select the hyper-linked server name to launch a more detailed EYE Status Summary. Now you can understand all of the business views for that particular environment to assess and prioritizes your action plan. The critical alerts in the Executive Building are likely to be raising some eyebrows, so it would be a good idea to understand key operating metrics of the devices in that network segment.
Your eye is drawn quickly to the CPU utilization of one particular switch on the EYE Device Metrics dashboard. There are several reasons why this could be happening and EYE was able to get you to the culprit in short order. Before receiving a customer complaint, you are well on your way to proactively addressing this issue. The new EYE dashboards deliver “at-a-glance” insight to the overall health of your network, saving time, enabling faster event resolution, and improving SLA compliance. Reporting with Entuity Eye of the StormGenerating reports can be manually intensive, time consuming and frustrating, particularly if the reported need is not a "canned report" provided by your network management software provider. Fortunately, a broad range of reporting is conveniently available in EYE. For example, the Network Summary Report module presents concise and graphical summary of key network statistics perfect for management review:
Entuity's Eye of the Storm FLEX Reporting allows you quickly and easily generate reports from EYE's management repository. Suppose your supervisor wants to present an availability report to his CEO. She has asked you to produce a report that shows the availability for the router that provides connectivity to a remote sales office in New Canaan, CT. She has also asked for a utilization report of the circuit that goes to that same location, for the period between March 6th and March 9th. And, of course, she wants it now, in a PDF format that can be easily read by the CEO. Using Eye of the Storm's flexible report generator, you can quickly deliver what she needs. By selecting a Monitored Device, and reporting on Component Availability for the period in question, and by filtering down to just the router to the sales office, and combining that with a bandwidth analysis of the port that goes to New Canaan, you get the boss what she needs.
This is just one example of how customers use Entuity's Eye of the Storm to provide meaningful information in today's fast-paced work environment. |
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