The Benefits of a Flexible Approach to Network Management

When choosing a network management platform there are a lot of factors that need to be considered to ensure you are using the best one for your organization. One of the premier factors that need to be considered is the flexibility that is inherent in the platform.

Why is flexibility important to you?

Every organization has a different network environment, from those pesky devices that really need to be upgraded but there never is budget to unique devices that no one has really ever seen. The ability to adapt to any network environment is a tremendous advantage that you will be able to use in your favour. This is further enhanced by the ability to adapt to new technologies or ones that weren’t originally considered within the scope, there is no value in spending resources to redesign an application when simple approaches are already available.

What happens when new devices are introduced?

NMIS was designed to be flexible and easily maintained in the field. The core of this was Opmantek’s focus on abstracting the device modelling layer, making it easy for engineering teams to modify how device information is collected, displayed, and thresholded. To change any of these features is quite straightforward, for more information regarding device modelling, check out the below webinar with Opmantek CTO Keith Sinclair;

https://opmantek.com/webinar-nmis-device-modeling/

NMIS will learn as much as it can about your network automatically and apply your collection policies to manage all the right things in a node, but sometimes, you want to override what it learns from the devices and tell it other things.  This is done using NMIS Node Configuration or nodeconf for short.  The intent of the nodeconf is that you do not need to modify the configuration of the actual device itself, you can change how NMIS is going to treat, handle this device by effectively modifying what data comes back from SNMP. To discover how to do this, look at this wiki page that outlines the process.

How about larger changes?

The above methods are fantastic if you have one or two devices that need to be changed/updated, but what happens at scale. Opmantek software has always been designed to be run at scale and doing bulk configuration changes is no exception. The GUI’s in all the software is available for manual tweaks, scripting is available for huge bulk changes. A great article with example scripting is available on our wiki here.