Investing time into automation can be extremely beneficial for you to achieve increased results, with less effort over time. Gartner has suggested that any manual task that is done more than four times a year should be automated. That may be on the extreme end because there are certain pitfalls that need to be avoided. The below image shows how people can spend too much time optimising and reviewing without actually saving any time.

Although this is a perfectly valid scenario, that occurs frequently, it shouldn’t scare you off automation. Here at Opmantek, we believe we have the tools to make Network Automation easy for you. There are too many individual ways to outline in one post, so this post will look at a single part and how it can make your life easier.

Open-AudIT’s Scheduled Reporting

Through Open-AudIT you gain a lot of insight into your network, the devices attached, as well as the software that is running on the devices. There is a lot of information that is collected, the difficult part is deciding what information is valuable to your organization. For example, a business may be interested in the new devices that are connected to their network or new software that has been installed recently. This information can be collected automatically and at specific times, wrapped up in a nice bow and then emailed to you.

Once you have Open-AudIT installed and have a device discovered you can create a scheduled report on that information. To create a report the first step is ensuring that the correct email details are in place. Navigate to ‘Admin’ in the menu bar on the top right, then ‘Configuration’ and finally ‘Email’ and you will have the email configuration screen loaded. Ensure all the details are correct and send a test email to yourself to make sure it is working.

Now we get to the fun stuff, that will make your life easier, while everyone thinks you are working double time. Open-AudIT uses ‘Tasks’ as the title for its automation, a task list can be found in ‘Admin’ and then ‘Tasks’, then ‘List Tasks.’ From this screen, you can set up the following types of tasks, Baseline, Discovery, Report, Query, Summary or Collector. In our previous post we did a single device discovery and had some success, let’s do that again but we will schedule it for Monday morning.

Click on ‘Create’ on the top right and you will have all the options for scheduling available to you, essentially this is the same as a manual process, just adding in the time element. Enter a nice test name (this can always be edited later) and for type, we want a report. This will add an additional menu item and we want the report titled ‘Devices Discovered in the Last 7 Days.’ See below for what it should look like. I have created this task to run every Monday morning at 8:50 am, this is perfect coffee drinking reading material.

If you configure this correctly, come Monday you will have a nice CSV report to look at, with one entry for our discovered device. However, in the future, this could be scaled to your organisational size, and before you even start your day, automation has completed a job for you. This demonstration is for one of the fantastic features inside Open-AudIT, there is more that is available too. Open-AudIT has a 20 device trial license for you to test out the features. If you would like a larger trial license don’t hesitate to contact us or even request a demo, we can help you get more wins every day.

Businesses are becoming more reliant on information technology to achieve day-to-day business goals. The importance of having the right technological processes in place has a direct result on the viability and profitability of a business. A common misconception when regarding poor internet connectivity, “the Internet is down”, this demonstrates how important maintaining a network is, because troubleshooting should start and end with a network engineer. However, in practice, that employee will take time out of their day to ‘fix the Internet’, the time taken is the business cost for not having a reliable network monitoring solution in place. The less reliable the network is, the higher the direct financial loss is.

At Opmantek, we take pride in being solution focused, let’s look at what you would need to solve the above problem. The solution to this problem is to have the right combination of tools, talent and design, you need the right people, in the right environment armed with the best toolset. Opmantek can assist any business by having the right tools, regardless of business size. The tools have been designed with synergy in mind, they all integrate with each other, there is set and forget configuration and full customisation is available if it is needed for your organisation. As well as APIs that will help integrate with existing software, it is made to have to be seamless in its installation.

The installation process is fast, the Virtual Machine can be up and running in 3 minutes, usable by your organisation just minutes after that. The flexibility of the software is seen when operating at scale or across regions because the solution can scale horizontally and vertically at any size you require, regardless of geographic locations. The software leverages agentless scripting, that removes the need to install software on every device while giving it the ability to generate incredible amounts of detail about your network. It is multi-tenanted out of the box and designed to be used for any device, any kit and anywhere.  Our demo server is housed in the Gold Coast office, see below, and used across the world, without delay.

The ability to share information with key stakeholders is crucial for business and personal success. Without the right knowledge, bad decisions can be executed. The ability to see information is essential, but so are the business decisions surrounding editing information. Without strict control over access, there can be security risks, even if they are not deliberate. Having the flexibility to implement role-based access controls or creating view only dashboards is an extremely valuable feature that gives the right information to the right people.

In the example above, where we had the broken internet, the ability to recognize that there is an issue, the speed of recognition, the ability to detect the root-cause of the issue and the speed that the issue is resolved are metrics that a successful network team would like to increase while fixing the connectivity issues. There are horror stories in the industry about groups of servers going down and the event notifications being missed due to other issues. The ability to correlate events, intelligently analyze resource load and automate remediation will help a network team reduce the time to solve issues. Opmantek offers a sophisticated business rules engine, that automates diagnostics and actions in response to events and gives actionable insight with guidelines to remediation.

Gartner has long preached that if a process is conducted four times a year, it should be automated, here at Opmantek we value that insight and extend it. We believe in automated and customizable alert escalation procedures. Custom thresholding is an extremely valuable tool if used correctly, combined with alert escalation and notification procedures will reduce the stress of a network engineer, reduce the workload and move the focus, from fighting fires to improving the overall efficiency of the network.

Businesses that are now operating in a bring your own device (BYOD) environment coupled with the Internet of Things (IoT) have seen the unprecedented stress on their networks, specifically where there was never a focus on networking. As technology has progressed, so has a general business’s reliance on technology to complete simple tasks. With this increased reliance on IT for business operations, there is a growth in the necessity of choosing the right Network Monitoring solution.

Want to see the power of our Network Monitoring solutions?

Register for a demo today and get back your workday!

The Networking Industry is known to impose high expectations while operating with minimal resources. This develops network engineers to become some of the more resourceful employees and most valuable assets to any organisation.

A common question that we constantly get asked about our products is

“Can you do …” or “Can you help me with …”  or even “How does … work?”

and the best answer is always, let’s show you in a demo.

But what consists of a demo from Opmantek?

A demo involves setting up a common time with one of our Systems Engineers to demonstrate our products that are running off a server in our office on the Gold Coast of Australia. It is a fantastic way to see the insights and power that our products deliver while seeing the how fast our actions are completed (if you are outside Australia you are dealing with international levels of latency).

The first screen you will see from our products is the Virtual Machine that we offer (Download it here!) seen below. From this screen, the product that will solve your problem is just one click away. Our engineers will take you on a tour of the product while explaining the key features that are relevant to your needs.

However, the key feature of an Opmantek demo is the ability to outline a problem that you are having with your network and have one of our engineers show you how a solution can be easily achieved with our software. The flexibility and customisation in our products allow us to solve most problems facing network engineers.

Every network can be optimised further and with our tools, the following organisations have all seen value in our products:

Opmantek has built its application suite with a few core principles shaping the decision making. Having an Open-Source core is very important, the ability to generate large amounts of data for customers, allowing for customisation to the programs and most relevant to the current article, the ability to integrate with as much as possible.

Integration into custom applications or reporting can be done with our RESTful API; there is an ability to create anything that is required personally. Open-AudIT, for instance, has their API outlined here!

A critical feature that often gets overlooked, however, is the ability to create a dashboard for a client or custom group and allow access to view the dashboard without directly logging in to our system. This can be achieved using a generated token that is embedded into a URL that can be followed. The setup process for this can seem initially complex, but there is a very detailed article on how to implement this here!

This is a useful feature to give users access to the system without giving them direct control, for example, to managers who only want to see that SLAs are met or customers who only need to view their own data.

Using a combination of Delegated Authentication and RBAC, Managed Service Providers have been able to build out customer portals with relatively easy authentication protocols.

To find out more about our products ask for a Demo, where we take you on a live tour of all our solutions.

Register Here!