How To Truly Optimize OpEvents And OpConfig For Your Environment

Opmantek has always believed that all of your solutions should be connected and working together towards a single goal, maintaining a better network. Working together with new customers, our engineers love creating automated solutions that help solve their networking issues. With this in mind, Mark Henry, Opmantek’s Senior Systems Engineer, has put together a webinar series that will leverage opEvents and opConfig to help assist in the development of Operational Process Automation (OPA) that is tailored to your business.

This five-part series leverages opEvents, opConfig and NMIS to help facilitate automation into your organization. Using the points in the webinars you will be able to help progress your organization from a level 0/1 on the Gartner IT service management maturity model to a level 3/4.

The webinars range from 30 minutes to 60 minutes, they are full of information so be prepared to take notes. If you wish to follow along with the slides, they all will be at the bottom of this post. You can download both products free and use them with a lifetime 20 device licence, we also curate a virtual machine that has all our downloadable modules preinstalled and ready to go.

2. Collecting Non-SSH/Telnet device configurations

Webinar Page

opConfig 3.1.1 introduced the ability to collect or transform configuration data using a plugin architecture. This new feature can collect/transform configuration data from devices that do not have a traditional command-line interface (CLI) accessed through SSH/Telnet.
The second webinar will look at:

• How to architect and implement an opConfig Plugin.
• Methods for shelling out from the plugin to another program and handle returned data.
• Create a simple plugin to read and parse a file (i.e. CSV, TXT, JSON, XML, etc) into actionable data.
• How to transform configuration data with a plugin.
• How to raise and manage NMIS alerts.

3. Responding to Unauthorized Configuration Changes using opConfig and opEvents

Webinar Page

It happens all the time, an engineer shifts a setting for troubleshooting and forgets to put it back when he’s done. Another configures a device from memory, rather than the checklist, and a device gets deployed with a default password still in effect. Across town, an employee brings a wireless router into work and plugs it into his cubical port so he can have access around the office.
The third webinar looks at these issues:

• How to configure opConfig to collect device configurations and raise alerts to NMIS.
• How and when to take action on reported configurations changes.
• How to leverage opConfig’s setting push capability in response to an event.

4. Expanding on SNMP/WMI Collection with NMIS Collect Plugins

Webinar Page (there are no slides for this webinar)

Opmantek’s award-winning performance and fault monitoring system, NMIS, collects device data using SNMP and WMI polling, processes incoming SNMP traps, and conducting service monitoring. When that isn’t enough, you can expand on device Collection using NMIS Collect Plugins.
This webinar you will discover:

• How and When NMIS Collect Plugs can be used.
• The Four vital limitations of Collect Plugins, and why they matter.
• How to build your first Collect Plugin in just five minutes.

5. Managing Complex Event Responses

Webinar Page

This webinar introduces the concept of using opEvent’s Actions to create a Complex Adaptive System (CAS) that handles troubleshooting and event remediation. A CAS is any system made up of independent operators or agents. Each agent does one or two very well defined operations independently from the rest of the system. With this pattern, you will be able to quickly build a responsive event handling system that is customized to how your organization works and learns.

The final webinar covers:

• Core concepts of a CAS system and how implementing it will improve maintainability and scalability of the solution.
• Methods for designing the overall event escalation system – How to create useful troubleshooting scripts, including collecting device configuration information, for every event.
• Building notification routines to handle all situations; after hours, weekends, vacations, and non-response.
• Expanding actions to proactively respond to events; reconfiguring devices (using opConfig), restarting services, and leveraging APIs.

Conclusion

There was a lot of information to digest in these webinars, but if you took the time and implemented the learning into your operating environment your ability to use OPA will be further along than any of your competitors.

Follow along with the slides:

• Webinar 1 – Advanced Diagnostics and Network Automation with opEvents
• Webinar 2 – Collecting Device Configurations
• Webinar 3 – Responding to Unauthorized Configuration Changes
• Webinar 5 – Managing Complex Event Responses