The act of automation can greatly improve the efficiency of any network team. With regards to managing network infrastructure, Gartner suggests that any manual task performed more than 4 times a year should be automated. These mandates are usually answered by the more proactive teams and remain a fancy for most teams struggling with limited resources. However, the initial cost, in time or budget, is minor compared to the ability to leverage the opportunity costs of reducing human error, improving compliance and increasing work availability of staff.

Process automation is becoming a requirement because humans may no longer be able to manually keep up with real-time configuration changes. The prioritization of automation technologies enables a business to become more agile and responsive to shifting market/customer requirements.

The fast-approaching addition of the GDPR compliance standard to existing standards, PCI or HIPAA for example, will require businesses to be less passive with risk management. Risk should be managed and not avoided, GDPR acts as an invitation to change traditional business protocols because there is no avoiding the GDPR. To mitigate the risk of the GDPR improved compliance and accurate reporting is required, both rewards to successful network automation.

A common misconception regarding automation is that the outcome reduces the size of a team. This can occur in a reactive business, but a proactive business will transfer the workload from one project to another. The ability to cross train or upskill staff will make your team more valuable. There is the added benefit of becoming more agile in your approach to transitioning workflow from administrative tasks towards managing infrastructure or increasing client satisfaction.

Configuration and Compliance Management is now easier to implement with opConfig. opConfig will continuously monitor the configuration of devices discovered by Open-AudIT Enterprise or managed by NMIS, track the changes and store a complete history of configuration information. opConfig can leverage NMIS’ business policy engine, opEvents, to provide instantaneous correlation and notification when device configurations change or stray from enterprise policies. The combination of these systems will aid in your network automation, assist in the quick resolution of problems and compliance with standards.

In ITIC’s 2016 survey 98% of respondents indicated a single hour of network downtime costs them over $100,000, while 81% of Enterprises reported hourly outage costs exceeding $300,000, and 33% reporting losses in excess of $1-5 million/hour. When we talk network downtown we’re really referring to application and business service availability – is the software the business relies on operating within acceptable norms of responsiveness and accuracy?

Gone are the days when engineers could simply wait for an end-user to phone in a performance problem. Networks are far too complex, with multiple layers of redundancy and fail over, for the focus to be on the individual parts – a manager once told me, “it’s not the equipment that make the money, it’s what the equipment enables us do that gets everyone paid.” With potential losses of 5MM/hr it is crucial network teams have the tools in place to handle performance and fault monitoring, automate event handling, and roll-up individual device state and service status into more complex application and business service profiles.

You can visualize application and business service monitoring as a multi-layer problem; a pyramid of pieces. At the very bottom, the wide base of the pyramid, are all the individual parts, or widgets, that represent the components of the service. These are the servers, storage devices, switches, and load balancers that the application relies on for hosting and operation. But that base layer is also comprised of the specific key interfaces data flows through as well as the services each server hosts that the application needs – like the mysql or apache daemon. Above that layer are the components that comprise the entry user experience (UX); does the application’s login page load in a reasonable time? Finally, at the top-end of the pyramid is an end-to-end exercise of the application itself. Usually referred to as a synthetic transaction, this is about ensuring the entire application works from presentation, to business logic, and back-end layer.

The chart below displays the results of just such a test. The black line represents the state of the synthetic transaction, while the yellow line shows how long it takes to execute the synthetic transaction and get a result back. You can see where the black line dips that the synthetic transaction failed during that period, but since the yellow line was still drawing something came back, just not the expected result.

Each of these parameters can be thresholded, with escalation rules, and alarms assigned quickly and reliably using Opmantek’s Network Monitoring Information System (NMIS) Solution for performance and fault monitoring. Expanding NMIS with opCharts allows the creation of detailed application centric dashboards containing easily interpreted charts, like the one above.

Demands placed on the Network Operations Center increases exponentially as the Lines of Businesses they server become more dependent on applications and their frameworks to generate revenue. Tools like Opmantek’s NMIS, opCharts, and others can help engineers quickly and efficiently go from a high, abstracted view of the application down to a root cause, automating collection of troubleshooting information and even self-heal the network.

For more information on Opmantek’s Discovery and Asset Auditing, Performance and Fault Monitoring, Configuration and Compliance Solutions, or to schedule a demonstration, please visit our website at www.opmantek.com or email us at contact@opmantek.com.

Paul McClendon | Software Support 
Desk: 1(704)909-2829 
paulm@opmantek.com

“Open-AudIT is exactly what we needed to be able to address the GDPR requirements of a large European government. We had it up and collecting in 90 minutes.” – PeterS (Sales Engineering head of EMEA Global Systems Integrator).   The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a regulation that intends to strengthen and unify data protection for all individuals within the European Union (EU). It also addresses the export of personal data outside the EU. If your company is EU based or does business in the EU, you will have to comply with the GDPR. The GDPR comes into effect on the 25th May, 2018.   Open-AudIT can provide very valuable insights into your IT infrastructure and assist in your GDPR compliance.   As part of the GDPR you must be able to show that you know where your customer data is stored and be monitoring for potential breaches. To be able to determine where your data is, first you need to know What’s On Your Network. Obviously, this is where Open-AudIT steps up.   From download to install to discovering devices and reporting on their hardware, software and settings in under 10 minutes. Don’t believe me? Too good to be true? Check out this recent blog post of mine that proves it. Under 10 minutes from nothing to having a discovered network of devices.   Not only can Open-AudIT discover your devices, but it also tracks any changes to them. Software installed or removed, users & group membership changes, file changes, hardware changes – and so much more. So there’s your devices found and any changes to them being recorded.   But Open-AudIT can do more, much more. What about listing all your databases (SQL Server and MySQL) and websites (IIS and Apache)? What about comparing a group of devices to see where they are different in terms of installed software? What about emailing the many included reports and summaries directly to you in a format of your choosing? What about the Restful JSON API. It’s completely open. It’s your data. We just help you to unlock it.   And on top of that – what about automating it all?   Open-AudIT really does make it simple to report on What’s On Your Network and help with your GDPR compliance.   Download it today from https://opmantek.com/network-discovery-inventory-software/, there’s a free 20 device license waiting for you.   I genuinely hope you find Open-AudIT as useful as I do.   Oh, and by the way – I still didn’t mention Active Directory and OpenLDAP integration. And the maps. And the networks listing. And assigning assets to different departments or companies. And the custom fields. And the many inbuilt queries and summaries. And the ability to make your own queries and summaries. And the other features too numerous to list. It’s all documented on the Open-AudIT wiki. Check it out for either a quick overview or a deep dive into the specifics. And if you have questions – there’s always the Forums and Questions sites as well!   What are you waiting for? Try Open-AudIT today!

It is well known that any partnership that is built on mutual gain has more potential to last longer and progress further. How to define this relationship, however, can be difficult when dealing with constantly changing technology and differing client bases. The relationship between a managed service provider (MSP) and a business is one that can be prone to these difficulties, especially if the service level agreements (SLA’s) are not defined precisely.

The critical factor for a successful MSP is being able to predict and be proactive to problems rather than reactive. This is what will differentiate you from a break/fix method, but also increase your customer satisfaction. If an MSP can predict hardware malfunction or server thresholds, the advice that can be given is invaluable in the MSP/Business relationship. The fundamental principle behind this is increasing the user experience inside the business.

The end goal, to increase user experience, should be the focus for MSPs; this is a crucial factor for a successful business. With a happy user experience, there is an increase in staff productivity which can help the business grow. Changing the MSP’s goal of keeping the equipment in an ideal state to increasing or maintaining user experience, can help solidify business relationships.

The higher the communication and visibility that a user has, can help facilitate the belief they are in an actual consultative working relationship; currently, 48% of businesses working with an MSP would prefer a higher level of consultative relationship. This will increase the businesses perceived value for money with the SLA because you are working intimately with the MSP regardless of the situation. Further, the level of service is increased because the MSP has a better understanding of why client requirements are present. When those two factors are taken into consideration, the business has a higher return on investment, and the MSP is doing a better job, this is mutually beneficial.

The change in mentality from equipment state to customer satisfaction requires the MSP to adjust their monitoring and reporting. The adjustments may include things such as 3rd party SaaS monitoring, software licensing management, even topographical readings. A customer is happier when their internet/service is down if they know why, i.e. poor weather. Further, the ability to predict trouble can facilitate better relationships, through hardware monitoring an MSP can predict when hardware may need replacing.

Presenting meaningful data to businesses through meetings can increase the level of control and transparency that a client has over their system while simultaneously growing the business relationship. To gain the data an MSP can use opTrend, it provides cutting-edge predictive analytics. The AI-driven application identifies resources that are showing abnormal activity based on historical behaviour and provides an organisation with correct trend analysis of critical resources. This assists in the early detection of potential failures and resource exhaustion.

An application that builds its own baselines will be more accurate than any model that is provided by a vendor. Using six months of data, a baseline is constructed that is a custom representation of the device while taking into account the time of day and also the day of the week. This builds an accurate snapshot of what your system should be doing at a given time and assists in identifying outliers that aren’t considered normal.

The graph above demonstrates the power of the application; the blue lines are the expected ranges, the green is the overall mean, and the black is the recorded value. The graph indicates that on December 6th, the system was in heavy use, but it was expected and not considered an outlier, this may be due to a system back-up for instance. However, from December 9-13 there was a significant increase that is not regarded as normal. Using this information, although no major fault may have occurred, an MSP could extrapolate potential vulnerabilities in the future.

Knowing what is on your network is equally as important as understanding how your network operates. An often overlooked component while gathering performance data is accounting for scheduled outages.

If scheduled outages are not accounted for, there can be negative effects on your reporting and your efficiency. Preparation can stop events from expected outages taking up valuable diagnostic time by engineers. Further, the performance metrics will look better while being more accurate.

Using opCharts, scheduled outages can be planned and tracked. By leveraging the powerful tools at your disposal, you can view, display and warn about planned outages. This creates a historical record of start time, stop time and which user created the outage for review purposes. Communication between teams is increased by having a regular maintenance window that is agreed upon by all.

To create or view existing scheduled outages select the Views drop-down menu and select Scheduled Outages.

This will display a list of all the scheduled outages that are in the system. If you would like to add a new outage, simply click the New Outage button.

This will open a window to input a new Scheduled Outage.

Once these are filled in and saved there is a scheduled outage in place and you are one step closer to having the most reliable data.

The standards for many organizations are still in the proverbial “dark ages” when it comes to keeping track of what is on their network. As a support engineer with Opmantek I speak with multiple engineers every day. It isn’t unusual for me to hear that engineers at large, fortune 500 companies are still using text documents, spreadsheets, and even sticky notes to manage their device inventories. The challenge with this is in how long the manual process takes. Manually updating records often leads to maintaining inventory records inconsistently causing the information to be incorrect and outdated.

Opmantek’s Open-AudIT software delivers IT auditing and inventory management automation as well as many other useful features. Keeping track of your organizations computers, printers, telephones, or any other network device is made easy with Open-AudIT. There are many ways to get information into Open-AudIT, one way to do this is to simply enter your networks subnet(s) and valid credentials and watch Open-AudIT start to populate with your network information. With this information you can keep track and report on what software the devices have installed, warranty information, software licenses, hardware information, configuration changes, and much more. Open-AudIT monitors any changes made to your network, i.e software updates, devices removed, or added etc. This is accomplished by running scheduled scans of your network daily, weekly, or any other time designated by you then, compares the audit results over time to previous scan results.

Customizable fields and queries allow you to keep track of any other information you feel is relevant to your organization. Open-AudIT comes preloaded with many queries out of the box. Device types, installed software, hardware changes are a few of these. If a query is needed that is not pre-packaged, Open-AudIT allows you to create and customize queries to address any of your specific needs. Quickly migrating from your current manual inventory and device management process is designed to be as automated as possible. Open-AudIT can import inventory information from various formats including XML, CSV, and others. For those still managing your inventory with spreadsheets and other files, this feature allows for the seamless implementation of your inventory records into Open-AudIT.

This software offers so many more features than just what was discussed here and did I mention… You can even use the community edition of Open-AudIT for free to get a feel for how it works! The community edition gives you Network Discovery, Device and Software Auditing (including Device Port and Storage Appliances), Configuration Changes Detection and Reporting, Hardware Warranty Status, Inventory Management, and Custom Fields. If you really wanted to keep your network monitoring and inventory management system up to date along with having other useful features, you can upgrade from the Community edition to the Professional or Enterprise editions. With the professional and Enterprise editions, you get Interactive Dashboards, Geographical maps, Scheduling of discoveries and reports, and enhanced reports. These editions also come with Commercial support to provide you with any assistance you may need in implementing and customizing Open-AudIT to your specific needs. The Enterprise version is highly scalable for large organizations and includes additional features that improve and simplify administration. Enterprise also includes File Auditing, Baselines, and Configurable Role Based Access Control including Active Directory and LDAP support. More information on the different versions of Open-AudIT can be found on the Opmantek website.

Having all of your device and inventory information in one place while replacing most of the manual process behind maintaining that information can save countless hours. Custom fields and queries allow you to be in control of what information you want to collect, report on, and view. Configuration changes let you know when a device has been removed or added. I don’t believe sticky notes or spreadsheets can do that. Make the switch to Open-AudIT and see how easy it is to know what is on your network.