NetMRI Did You Know...?
Many organizations need a tool for their help desk or operational support team to use to determine the logical location of an end user workstation. The typical use is to find the switch port to which a user’s workstation is connected, either for checking operational characteristics like duplex mismatch or speed, or to monitor traffic on that port, or to disable the port because the workstation has been infected. People that we talked with called this function “user tracking”, because it is typically used to track users on the network. The result is NetMRI’s FindIT™.
This person’s IP Phone, defined in the Close Matches section, is connected to the switch identified in the Neighbors section. The search field can contain user names, device names, IP addresses, MAC addresses. Entering portions of search strings may match multiple systems, such as finding all systems within a given subnet by specifying the first characters of the subnet number. (No, it doesn’t do binary math to match on subnet prefixes. Think Google-style matching and you’re closer to how it works.) The input string is used to search for exact or close matches on inventory and location data. Of course, there is more data in the NetMRI database, and you get to see it by mousing over the ‘+’ at the beginning of the line, resulting in more device details being displayed. CSV export of all the data is available so you can easily transfer the data to other applications or use it for other purposes.
