Most network management tools provide a way to group devices and interfaces based on a variety of information, including descriptions, addresses, and names. I've been thinking about how to use the descriptions in both devices and interfaces to enable the automatic grouping mechanisms to help manage...

Do you know what's happening in your data center? I've been working with two customers who are just starting to monitor the switch ports within their data centers. There are many good reasons for complete data center monitoring of all interfaces/ports. 1. Most data centers employ some amount...

One of our customers had an interesting problem recently that caused a network outage in a critical part of the network. An interface blade was inserted into a Cisco Cat6500, but the blade didn't pass diagnostics. The blade had been checked out in a lab switch, but for some reason, perhaps a bent...

I'm helping a customer improve their network through better network management visibility into network problems. The result of a proof-of-concept is this graph, which I'll explain below. The customer loved the graph because it showed the total number of problems and, more importantly, it showed...

The first component of a good network management system is an event handling system. A basic event handling system can be easily implemented with open source tools like syslog-ng . Just watching the new events arrive can be very enlightening. Many network operations teams gain visibility into their network...

I've been doing Data Center design recently and the customers are interested in what to monitor and why it should be monitored. At first, a data center is just another set of edge devices, albeit servers, connected to a set of access switches. But the traffic patterns and usage in the data center...

I've written in this blog about various reasons for using network automation but it is time to put them together. Counting down… 7. Performance and SLAs The first thing that network management does is performance monitoring. It's conceptually easy, but surprisingly challenging, primarily...

Device naming standards are boring. Why should we even talk about them? When you're in the middle of a network melt-down and you are having problems remembering device names and IP addresses, it isn't boring; it's frustrating. But that's not the right time to be thinking about device...

You have a lot of switches and routers, more than you care to count. The IOS in each of them is now old and needs updating. You're not looking forward to handling each one with a manual process. What are your options? Well, if you did five of them a day, you could do 25 per week. Ten a day would...

I was doing some research on the costs and causes of network downtime and came across a more recent white paper than the information from 2001 that I had previously found. This paper, The Impact of Network Downtime on Business Today , was done in 2007 by Networks First, in conjunction with Warwick Business...