Cisco and Arista have agreed on a ceasefire regarding their ongoing legal battle. A joint statement regarding the matter is outlined below;

“Cisco and Arista have come to an agreement which resolves existing litigation and demonstrates their commitment to the principles of IP protection. They have agreed that, with limited exceptions, no new litigation will be brought over patents or copyrights related to existing products, for five years. In addition, for three years, they will use an arbitration process to address any patent issues regarding new products. As part of this agreement, Arista will be making a $400 million payment to Cisco, is committed to maintaining the product modifications it made as a result of previous rulings and will be making limited changes to further differentiate its user interfaces from Cisco’s.”

The result can be seen as a positive for both parties, even if Arista is out of pocket $400mil. Cisco was able to protect their technology while maintaining their extensive network of users. Arista has steadily grown its user base and developing enterprise success, Gartner has even shortlisted Arista as a solution for large-scale environments. Regardless of your organizational decision, NMIS will be able to monitor the performance of both Cisco and Arista devices, and over 10,000 other vendors too.

For auditing and management purposes it can be advantageous to baseline individual devices against a fixed, known gold standard device. Baselines enable you to combine audit data with a set of attributes you have previously defined (your baseline) to determine the compliance of devices.

For example – you might create a baseline from a device running CentOS 6 that acts as one of your Apache servers in a cluster. You know this particular server is configured to your standards, but you’re unsure if the other servers in the cluster are configured correctly. Baselines enable you to determine this.

The steps required for this process are outlined below.

1. Identify the device that is your gold standard that you want to compare similar devices against:

• First focus on what the end goal is, are you trying to baseline software, users, or Netstat data? What are the critical aspects to compare and report on?
• Do you have a gold standard for this configuration? Perhaps a device located in a lab environment or a workstation you use to clone workstation VMs from.

2. Create a Baseline for the exemplary device:

• In Open-AudIT Enterprise, Select Manage -> Baselines -> List Baselines from the top menu
• To create a new entry click the Create button in the top right-hand corner 
• Detailed instructions on creating Baselines can be found here – Baselines

3. Determine how often you want to run the Baseline check against the database and create a Scheduled Report:

• Select Report -> Scheduled Reports from the top menu
• To create a new entry click the Create button in the top right-hand corner
• Note – Under Type make sure to select Baseline, and under Group you should select a Group of devices that apply to this baseline, selecting similar groups of devices will prevent erroneous entries to be logged.
• More information on Scheduling Tasks can be found here – How to Schedule Tasks in Open-AudIT.

Managing a network can be expensive, time-consuming, and at times confusing. Mixing different software and hardware products that are meant to assist in network management can sometimes add to the confusion. Managing different software versions, vendors, and products that only work with specific OS’s can become a job in itself. Following the best standards and practices combined with a good network monitoring and inventory software solution, can help you streamline the management process and increase performance management. No other IT standard is more valuable or praised than ITIL/ITSM (Information Technology Infrastructure Libraries, Information Technology Service Management). Adhering to this standard along with implementing FirstWave’s software solutions can reduce the number of tools your team uses, increase performance management while lowering noise and confusion.

Learning and implementing the ITIL service lifecycle will significantly improve all aspects of IT management. However, ITIL is made up of an extensive series of processes. This blog will be focusing on the big four that have the most significant impact on performance management. The big four includes Incident, Availability, Capacity, and Service Level Management.

Incident management is defined as a process for logging, recording, and resolving incidents. Not only can following ITIL help with incident management, but it also allows for operational maturity as a bonus. Operational maturity entails moving from a chaotic environment to one with value. Chaotic situations are typically ad hoc, have little to no documentation, and contain minimal IT operations. FirstWave solutions can assist you in every step towards a more mature organization. Moving from a chaotic level 0, as shown in the chart above, all the way to level 3 can be achieved merely by implementing NMIS, Open-AudIT, opEvents, and opReports. Getting to Level 4 is a matter of leveraging FirstWave solutions and planning within your organization to reach that goal.

These modules assist in inventory, alert and event management, component availability and more. The goal is to have a plan of action to resolve unexpected events and get services up and running again as quickly as possible. These solutions can help you and your team analyze network trends and predict incidents before many ever have a chance of occurring. If interested in learning more about the IT Service Management Maturity Model take a look at our webinar on this topic here.

Availability Management entails making sure that services are available for use during timeframes specified by SLAs. Another use of Availability Management is identifying and correcting issues before they have a chance to impact services. NMIS, FirstWave’s network management system, grants the ability to monitor services and create alerts when they are down or underperforming. These alerts can be seen visually through the GUI, sent as an email, or even sent as a text message. The alerts are automated and customizable and will only be sent to people you and your team deem relevant through an internal priority level system. Reliability is the key concept in Availability Management. Expanding NMIS to include opEvents will allow you to automate event handling and use proactive event management to lessen outages, improve performance, and provide a fast-track problem resolution solution while managing all your network events in one place.

As organizations grow so does the usage of IT services. With this growth in usage comes a need to upgrade CPU’s, storage, memory, etc. Proper Capacity management ensures that the resources required are the right size to meet current and future business requirements. FirstWave’s opTrend, opCharts, and NMIS modules allow your team to manage network resources and visually analyze key performance metrics proactively. This enables you to predict resource exhaustion and plan more effectively by having the ability to create actionable activities when any current or future resource exhaustion is identified.

Service Level Management’s goal is to have a negotiated SLA with customers, providing a framework by which services and service levels are defined and adhered to. Establishing the scope of services, hours of operations, and timelines to meet the SLAs are key factors in implementing a successful Service Level Management plan. Open-AudIT can assist your team with assessing the current state of your IT operations with detailed audits for Inventory Management, hardware/software changes, reporting, and more. This helps your team create more accurate infrastructure sizing and help mitigate the costs of excess or insufficient hardware capacity. Knowing exactly what is on your network makes it easier to meet SLAs and implementing FirstWave’s opSLA into your toolkit will grant you the ability to measure and monitor network and application response times with ease.

Keeping track of what is on your network, adhering to agreed upon SLAs, ensuring proper resources are allocated, automating event management and escalation, and adopting ITIL/ITSM does not require multiple tools from multiple vendors. It can all be accomplished with a group of FirstWave’s core solutions, reducing the clutter and confusion of keeping track of numerous licenses and vendors. Even if you do need to keep track of multiple licenses, FirstWave does that too.

Fully adopting the ITIL/ITSM and increasing performance management does not need to be a daunting task. Reach out to us and learn how your team can accomplish these goals and more. Schedule a demo of FirstWave solutions in action today or visit our learn portal for more information.

Hearing the word ‘automation’ may trigger images of a robot replacing human workers and rendering personal contributions to business irrelevant, as manual operations are replaced with automated processes. While it is true that technology is reshaping the way we work, it shouldn’t eliminate employment, instead, automation is offering key advantages for proactive businesses. Nevertheless, many businesses put automation in the too-hard basket, feeling they don’t have the time, money or staff required to automate operations in their workplace and thus fail to reap competitive advantages.

Are you one of them? The purpose of this blog is to highlight how automation should not be feared or avoided, as it can help businesses to achieve success and sustainability.

Some advantages of automation your business may be missing out on include:

1. Improved Processing Speeds

When a human is performing a task manually, they can only do so much in a certain time. When specific tasks are automated, processing times can dramatically improve through computational power and multithreading. Further, the worker(s) performing menial tasks are free to do other things, such as developing new skills, which ultimately helps productivity, job satisfaction and benefits the business.

2. Reliability

There is improved reliability in automating tasks when compared to manual tasking. Automating operations ensures that tasks run on time and in sequence, that there is the successful completion of prerequisite jobs, that all data being inputted is correct, and finally, that appropriate processing is performed.

3. Improved Tracking and Monitoring

Improved tracking and monitoring of processes is a considerable business benefit that occurs when automating tasks. Business Intelligence Software allows businesses to use automation to process more significant amounts of data and compile extensive information based on the results. These insights allow businesses to make informed decisions based on information that is collected, they now have a clearer insight into their performance and how their business operates.

4. Availability

Increased availability of collected data will significantly help businesses. It is possible to automate your save and recovery systems to ensure protection from potential disk loss or inadvertent damage to system objects resulting from human error.

5. Cost Savings

Automation also saves business money! By automating processes, more hours become available to workers to focus on more important tasks, in addition to there being a reduction in costly mistakes. This can make a significant difference to a business’s bottom line.

6. Reduced Human Error

Although briefed on earlier, it is worth specifically acknowledging the positive impact that automation can have on reducing human error. Even the most intelligent and reliable employee can make costly mistakes. Automating certain processes can ensure that key tasks are done quickly and efficiently, with a far reduced risk of error.

7. Business Growth

Finally, it is important to recognise how automation can facilitate growth for your business. When a worker is freed up from a time-consuming task that has been automated, they are free to move to focus on other tasks or departments within the business. This results in cost savings for businesses, which allow them to focus on investing in strategies targeting growth, expansion and allocation of workers to areas where their skills can be fully utilised.

In conclusion, hopefully, this blog has caused you to recognise the benefits of automating operations and identifying the areas where automation can contribute to the success of your business. Automation shouldn’t be perceived as a hassle or a threat to job security, rather it is an opportunity for businesses to do better!