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?

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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!

I have received some questions lately regarding how our systems deal with events and major outages. Dependent on your resolution environment you may call this a range of things such as hierarchical event management, deduplicating events or even weathering event storms. Regardless of the verbiage, the concept is the same, if a device is down, does your event management system send multiple notifications about dependent nodes also being down? opEvents handles these events in an incredibly simple method, using stateful deduplication and event correlation.

Stateful Deduplication

opEvents uses stateful deduplication to ensure that only one event has been created for one instance of a state. For example, if a node is registered as down, polled later and still down, this will not generate two events it will only be considered a single event. This is dependent on the current state still being registered as down and the node is not considered in a flap window. A flap is considered to be in effect if a node is going up and down inside a given window (default 90 seconds), this will help reduce the overall event notifications while still ensuring correct faults are recorded.

Event Correlation

The power of opEvents is encapsulated in how it handles event correlation. There is a point in fault management where a network engineer would prefer the right information compared to all the information. Event Correlation uses this principle to do some of the heavy-lifting for you and give you the information that is most relevant to a problem. A synthetic event can be generated that will process correlated events, based on location or dependency, for example, group these together and only one event is triggered. This will aid in diagnostics of faults, but also reduce the number of triggered events if a location is down.   The combination of these two principles can help reduce the time to detecting root cause while maintaining a vigilant watch over your network. If you can shape your event management with these principles, you will be getting the best information for you to do your job, without the extra noise. A little investment in this process will save you considerably in the long run.   As always our Community Wiki has detailed walkthroughs regarding how to implement these concepts:

• Event Correlation
• Event Correlation based on location
• Deduplication and storm control in opEvents

As well as some incredibly helpful webinars about these topics:

• Performance and Fault Management for MSP and Enterprise Level Businesses
• Configuring Event Escalation and Notifications
• Intelligent Fault and Configuration Management

If you have questions regarding any topics, have a feature request or any feedback, don’t hesitate to contact us – Here!

Over the last month, Australia’s largest telecommunications provider, Telstra, has come under fire because of three significant disruptions to their services. Although the incidents have been reported as coincidental, the company received negative feedback and complaints which aggregated together to form a negative brand image. When mistakes disrupt a whole country, one that is dependent on your services to run businesses, it is hard to rebound positively. This is exemplified in a significant loss in their share price the last month, dropping from $3.25 to $2.74 in two weeks. However, these disruptions should help shape the way every business deals with faults. If your business is reactive, significant operational faults will seem worse than your proactive competitors. There is an advantage in ensuring you are committing resources to proactive fault management. A quote from a communication manager that works to limit downtime for their clients best represents this issue, they wish to “solve customer problems before they even contact us”. This mentality, putting user satisfaction first, will help them generate more clients because they are focused on increasing user satisfaction. To start a change from a reactive to a proactive team requires resources committed to help shape an automation process. The upfront cost of developing these protocols can be high, but the ROI is seen shortly and is extrapolated over time. Essential information to start this can be found in the following webinars, conducted by Mark Henry:

• Developing a Strategic NOC
• Guide to automating Event Configuration
• Fault and configuration management for MSP

Mark is a Senior Systems Engineer at Opmantek but has built his own  MSPs; his history has been driven by increasing user satisfaction, this will give you the foundation to start automating your troubles away. If your focus is to improve user satisfaction, growing your business will be more straightforward and catastrophic events will be limited.