We just announced an agreement with Splunk, the IT search company (http://splunk.com), where the Splunk log file collection and analysis engine will be incorporated into NetMRI. This is the first OEM partnership we’ve done and it is an exciting one. Splunk is well known for their ability to search through enormous quantities of log files in a way that can’t be matched with basic tools like grep. David Carrasso, Senior Datamining Engineer at Splunk has a good blog entry on why Splunk is better than some of the other tools for mining log files at http://blogs.splunk.com/david/2005/09/30/one-geeks-reasons-for-splunk/.
NetMRI will take important log events from the Splunk system and correlate them with operational and configuration data that NetMRI has collected to improve its analysis. For example, knowing that an event is from a core router is likely to be more important than the same event from a small branch router. Automatically making this determination and properly prioritizing the events reduces the volume of busy-work that network engineers must perform and allows them to be more productive and to enjoy their jobs more (I don’t know of any network engineers who love repetitive tasks like digging through hundreds or thousands of similar log messages for the few important ones).
-Terry
About tslattery
Terry Slattery, CCIE #1026, is a senior network engineer with decades of experience in the internetworking industry.
Prior to joining Chesapeake NetCraftsmen as a full time consultant, Terry was the founder and CTO of Netcordia, and inventor of NetMRI, a suite of network management products. Terry started Netcordia as a consulting company in 2000 and transitioned to a network management product company in 2003. During the consulting days, he used his network design and implementation skills to lead a team in the design and implementation of a high availability network at a brokerage clearing house. Terry is the former President and founder of Chesapeake Computer Consultants, Inc., a networking and computer systems training and consulting company. He co-invented and patented the vLab(tm) internet-based remote lab system. He is co-author of the McGraw Hill text Advanced IP Routing in Cisco Networks. Terry led the team that developed the current Cisco IOS user interface under contract to Cisco Systems. Terry is experienced in the design and installation of large TCP/IP based networks and is a successful network protocol instructor. He is the second Cisco Certified Internetworking Expert (CCIE) #1026 and the first outside of Cisco. He enjoys membership on the Vanderbilt University Engineering School’s Industrial Advisory Board and the IEEE.