NMIS has long been one of the most widely used open-source network management systems in the world, but what many users don’t know is how easy it is to extend the core with the suite of add-on modules that replace other network tools and allow businesses to save on licensing costs and increase overall network performance visibility through system expansion and consolidation of applications.

Building Solutions with NMIS Modules

By combining NMIS with various other modules, FirstWave is able to provide software solutions to suit many different enterprise needs – here are a few of the popular combinations that are delivering strong results and allowing our customers to roll several stand-alone applications into one single NMIS licensing bundle.

Network Performance Management and Diagnostics

NMIS, opCharts and opReports

This combination of modules will provide you with the full NMIS capabilities for monitoring network health, capacity planning and event management and alerting, presented in interactive dashboards and reports that can be customised for user groups so that business users can see relevant performance information and engineers can see more detailed operational and information.

Configuration Management Database:

Open-AudIT Professional and opConfig

Looking to replace your CMDB?  This combination of modules is saving organisations thousands of dollars in licensing fees each year by automating device discovery and audit, storing configurations, monitoring changes and pushing configuration changes out to sets of devices.

Network Configuration and Compliance Automation

NMIS, Open-AudIT Professional/Enterprise, opConfig and opEvents

Save time and money on network administration by using process automation to manage inventory, remediate known issues, consolidate and deduplify events, automatically gather network information, detect and roll back configuration and file changes and more.

Traffic Management

NMIS 

This combination replaces other network monitoring and Netflow tools to give you a consolidated view of flow data including heat maps that visually indicate areas of congestion.

Anomaly Detection, Event Prediction and Remediation

NMIS, opTrend and opEvents

Identify issues and threats before they impact your business by leveraging the device and network data gathered by NMIS along with advanced machine learning to determine minute by minute standard baselines for your environment that can help you to identify new threats, unusual behaviour and escalating problems before they impact operations.

Remote Monitoring and Management

NMIS, opHA, opEvents and opCharts

For Managed Service Providers you can replace multi-million dollar RMM systems by combining NMIS with opHA and opCharts.  opHA allows you to increase the performance of applications and deliver high scale and high availability environments, including geographical distribution of the system and overlapping IP address ranges, while opCharts provides a single pane of glass and tiered user views, so that engineers can drill down from a full view of all managed customer equipment to a single device in a remote location, while customers can view their own sites privately and in real time.

There are a lot of options to improve your network, however, the easiest way to start is with our Virtual Machine. The VM comes preconfigured and is operational in under 5 minutes, Download the Virtual Machine and activate free 20 device licenses of each of the modules that interest you or request a demo from one of our engineers.

Introduction

As at Open-AudIT 2.3.2 and later, we have introduced some easy to use and extremely powerful options for discovering devices. These options centre around directing Nmap on how to discover devices.

We have grouped these options into Discovery Scan Options. We ship seven different groups of options (items) by default that cover the common use-cases.

This benefits Community, Professional and Enterprise customers.

Summary

Data breaches can happen for a variety of reasons. Some companies are hacked. Data can be mishandled or sold to third parties. Holes in a website’s security system can leave information unprotected. Some data breaches are deliberate, while others can occur as a result of outdated or unpatched software. Regardless, the consequences of a breach are usually costly for any business.

2018 proved to be another eventful year for cybercrime, with a number of news-worthy data breaches impacting organisations around the globe. Some of these affected hundreds of millions of customers and users.

Here are three of the major incidents that made headlines:

1.   Cathay Pacific
Hong Kong’s flag carrier experienced a data breach that exposed personal information of almost 10 million passengers. While flight systems and safety were not affected by the breach, information accessed without authorisation included passport and credit card numbers, names, nationalities, dates of birth, phone numbers, as well as emails and addresses.

2.   Facebook
Cambridge Analytica – a data-collecting firm – illegally harvested the information of an estimated 87 million users without their permission. The operation was politically motivated – namely, to influence the 2016 US presidential campaign. While the breach occurred a couple of years ago, investigatory conclusions only emerged in 2018, giving us a clearer picture of what happened.

3.   Marriott
Marriott’s Starwood reservation database was breached by an unauthorised party, affecting up to 500 million guests who had booked at one of its Starwood properties. Around 327 million of these guests had some combination of the following information stolen: name, address, phone number, email address, passport number, Starwood Preferred Guest account information, date of birth, gender, arrival and departure information, reservation date, and communication preferences. Some credit card information was also leaked, but card numbers were encrypted.

Conclusion

As technology continues to advance, the need to evolve cyber security strategies is as prevalent as ever. Examining the shortcomings that lead to high-profile cyber breaches can teach us some valuable lessons.

FirstWave can help your organisation bolster its cyber security posture and stay ahead of zero-day attacks. Learn more about our Cloud Email Security.

It’s that time of year when every research organisation and tech magazine is sharing their top trends for 2019.  When it comes to IT Infrastructure and Operations Management trends, the focus is on catering for larger, more diverse networks and ensuring security and compliance as more and more ‘things’ are connected to an enterprise network.

According to Gartner’s Top 10 Trends Impacting Infrastructure & Operations for 2019 Network Agility (or lack of?) and Digital Diversity Management should be key focus areas for this year.

Network agility (or lack of?)

Moving forward we will continue to see our networks underpinning critical business processes across a broader range of connected devices.  Network teams over the past few years have been focused on increasing availability but to ensure future success the focus needs to go beyond this and on to how all network operations can be performed at greater speed.  RPA and building greater network agility that delivers automation and orchestration is key to success in this area.

“Network teams must collaborate heavily with other business units as new opportunities in 5G and edge computing arise”

As cloud-based infrastructure becomes more prevalent and the scale of ‘things’ and endpoints increase, networks will need to evolve to cope with the increased stress that it will create on the network.

Digital diversity management

When Gartner refers to Digital diversity management, they are not talking about people, but rather the growing combination of new, obscure and ageing assets and technologies that are now being utilised within modern organisations.

”The importance of identifying, discovering and monitoring those that directly impact or support the business cannot be understated”

Maintaining accurate inventory and ensuring visibility and management of assets are major challenges that will emerge between 2020 and 2025.

What can I do to get ahead of the trend?

Opmantek software leads the way in IT Audit and Network Automation and Management for large and diverse networks. With over 10,000 hardware vendors preconfigured and a unique device modelling feature that enables you to discover, monitor and manage ANY DEVICE.  For a free demonstration on how Opmantek Software can help you gain control of the networks of the future fill out the form below.

As the world becomes more and more connected telecommunications, internet, and managed service providers must compete with one another to provide the fastest, most affordable, and cutting-edge services.

Traditionally these industries have been heavily laden with rules, requirements, and regulations that have resulted in large volumes of manual operational processes focused towards managing data, controlling cost and business efficiency, and developing new services.  Adhering to these processes can be so time-consuming that it prevents these service providers from focusing on the most critical aspect of their business: their customers.

In recent years, however, technologies have evolved to a point that networks can now be more digital and as a result, more dynamic, flexible, and customisable. The use of Robotic Process Automation can make systems intelligent and more automated, enabling predictive and near-real-time actions. These systems, when coupled with an agile management model, can have a massive impact on response times, time to root cause, and preventative remediation reducing costs while improving customer experience.

What Is RPA?

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is the integration of artificial intelligence and machine learning abilities into a computer or robot, to carry out repetitive tasks, manipulate data and communicate with digital systems in order to improve efficiency and performance.

Image Source: Deloitte

RPA Adoption In Numbers

In September 2017, Deloitte invited organisations globally to take part in an online survey on their use of RPA.  They received responses from over 400 organizations across many industries with a combined value of $1.8 trillion. The information was then analysed and published in a 2018 report titled “The robots are ready. Are you? Untapped advantage in your digital workforce.”

The report revealed the massive extent to which organisations are using RPA to improve business efficiencies.  RPA projects consistently outperformed expectations on non-financial benefits such as accuracy, timelines, flexibility, and improved compliance, with at least 85% of respondents reporting that RPA met or exceeded their expectations in these areas. In addition, a total of 61% reported their expectations of cost reduction were being met or exceeded. Some highlighted the fact that this enabled them to move people from performing transactional tasks to higher-value activities that also led to greater job satisfaction.

Expectations were also exceeded when it came to the FTE capacity that could be provided by robots. Most organisations in implementing RPA forecast it could replace around 20% of existing human tasks. In fact, those that have scaled RPA appear to have had such a positive experience that their expectations are even more ambitious: they believe that 52% of FTE capacity could be provided by robots. This can enable the human workforce to be redeployed to more value-adding activities.

“RPA augments what our people do: it supplements their capability, it means that they can focus on things that are more value added, that are more interesting.”   Shared Services Director, Multinational building-materials company

RPA – A Telco’s Best Friend

In the managed IT Services and Telecommunications industries, RPA is being rapidly adopted as a key strategy to help with enterprise planning to improve networks, including changes to performance management, network design, and network digitization.

Software providers such as Opmantek recognised early the opportunity for Managed Service Providers, Telcos and even centralised IT departments to utilise RPA to leverage the volumes of network data their monitoring systems were collecting to drive operational insights (predictive analytics) and to increase impact from this data significantly by combining it with Cognitive Automation – applying machine learning techniques to automate responses to trends and anomalies, based on the laws of probabilities.

Across some of the worlds largest and most complex telecommunications and enterprise networks, the sentiments and improvements recorded company-wide in the Deloitte survey are similarly reflected in the cost savings, service improvements and reassignment of skilled engineers from repetitive, mundane tasks to more specialised and impactful areas of the business.  

For these service providers, the operational tasks of IT teams have altered significantly, with RPA taking care of procedural and budgetary adherence and human resources now able to focus on every business’ top priority: customers.

Start exploring how RPA will work in your organisation by downloading the Opmantek Virtual Machine today and activating your free license for up to 20 devices.  If you would prefer to have an engineer walk you through the software, fill out the form below.

Opmantek has always believed that all of your solutions should be connected and working together towards a single goal, maintaining a better network. Working together with new customers, our engineers love creating automated solutions that help solve their networking issues. With this in mind, Mark Henry, Opmantek’s Senior Systems Engineer, has put together a webinar series that will leverage opEvents and opConfig to help assist in the development of Operational Process Automation (OPA) that is tailored to your business.

This five-part series leverages opEvents, opConfig and NMIS to help facilitate automation into your organization. Using the points in the webinars you will be able to help progress your organization from a level 0/1 on the Gartner IT service management maturity model to a level 3/4.

The webinars range from 30 minutes to 60 minutes, they are full of information so be prepared to take notes. If you wish to follow along with the slides, they all will be at the bottom of this post. You can download both products free and use them with a lifetime 20 device licence, we also curate a virtual machine that has all our downloadable modules preinstalled and ready to go.

2. Collecting Non-SSH/Telnet device configurations

Webinar Page

opConfig 3.1.1 introduced the ability to collect or transform configuration data using a plugin architecture. This new feature can collect/transform configuration data from devices that do not have a traditional command-line interface (CLI) accessed through SSH/Telnet.
The second webinar will look at:

• How to architect and implement an opConfig Plugin.
• Methods for shelling out from the plugin to another program and handle returned data.
• Create a simple plugin to read and parse a file (i.e. CSV, TXT, JSON, XML, etc) into actionable data.
• How to transform configuration data with a plugin.
• How to raise and manage NMIS alerts.

3. Responding to Unauthorized Configuration Changes using opConfig and opEvents

Webinar Page

It happens all the time, an engineer shifts a setting for troubleshooting and forgets to put it back when he’s done. Another configures a device from memory, rather than the checklist, and a device gets deployed with a default password still in effect. Across town, an employee brings a wireless router into work and plugs it into his cubical port so he can have access around the office.
The third webinar looks at these issues:

• How to configure opConfig to collect device configurations and raise alerts to NMIS.
• How and when to take action on reported configurations changes.
• How to leverage opConfig’s setting push capability in response to an event.

4. Expanding on SNMP/WMI Collection with NMIS Collect Plugins

Webinar Page (there are no slides for this webinar)

Opmantek’s award-winning performance and fault monitoring system, NMIS, collects device data using SNMP and WMI polling, processes incoming SNMP traps, and conducting service monitoring. When that isn’t enough, you can expand on device Collection using NMIS Collect Plugins.
This webinar you will discover:

• How and When NMIS Collect Plugs can be used.
• The Four vital limitations of Collect Plugins, and why they matter.
• How to build your first Collect Plugin in just five minutes.

5. Managing Complex Event Responses

Webinar Page

This webinar introduces the concept of using opEvent’s Actions to create a Complex Adaptive System (CAS) that handles troubleshooting and event remediation. A CAS is any system made up of independent operators or agents. Each agent does one or two very well defined operations independently from the rest of the system. With this pattern, you will be able to quickly build a responsive event handling system that is customized to how your organization works and learns.

The final webinar covers:

• Core concepts of a CAS system and how implementing it will improve maintainability and scalability of the solution.
• Methods for designing the overall event escalation system – How to create useful troubleshooting scripts, including collecting device configuration information, for every event.
• Building notification routines to handle all situations; after hours, weekends, vacations, and non-response.
• Expanding actions to proactively respond to events; reconfiguring devices (using opConfig), restarting services, and leveraging APIs.

Conclusion

There was a lot of information to digest in these webinars, but if you took the time and implemented the learning into your operating environment your ability to use OPA will be further along than any of your competitors.

Follow along with the slides:

• Webinar 1 – Advanced Diagnostics and Network Automation with opEvents
• Webinar 2 – Collecting Device Configurations
• Webinar 3 – Responding to Unauthorized Configuration Changes
• Webinar 5 – Managing Complex Event Responses