Have been working on AggreGate Network Manager for several months, we've made a lot of modifications and improvements along with totally new features --- many big, important, and really interesting ones. Should we say we have a new AggreGate Network Manager now? Looks like that.
Anyway we are currently (re-)documenting AggreGate Network Manager… and an idea emerged: why not to post some of its fresh and hot snippets here? We don’t see any impediments so far! And so here we go… starting with the Network Manager overview.
The major domain of AggreGate Network Manager is an operational aspect of network management: keeping the network (and the services that the network provides) up and running smoothly. The central part here is "monitoring the network to spot problems (outages, failing or slow components) as soon as possible, ideally before users are affected". Therein AggreGate Network Manager supports network problems detection, prognostication and diagnosing by:
- collecting, storing and processing quantitative characteristics of network parts and components producing source data for analysis tools;
- supporting data visualization and human analysis;
- providing tools to organize highly-customized automatic data processing, important events revealing, and response systems including full-fledged notifications and automatic corrective actions.
As a reaction to a network management event user can (manually or automatically) invoke suitable actions out of the provided by AggreGate Network Manager.
AggreGate Network Manager also provides facilities to organize asset management for hardware and software elements in network environment.
Summing up, AggreGate Network Manager functionally can be classified into few categories as follows.
Configuration
Providing advanced methods and tools for network monitoring, AggreGate Network Manager includes a variety of configuration facilities allowing to form monitoring infrastructure by discovering, adding, and setting up devices to be monitored, as well as configuring monitoring tools, and customizing AggreGate Network Manager Server for better performance.
Network Devices and Application Monitoring
Monitoring can be considered as the most important aspect of AggreGate Network Manager as it concerns nearly all the tasks network administrators meet. Monitoring subsystem of AggreGate Network Manager provides
- collecting various data, including availability and performance metrics, from devices, services and applications, and their resources (CPU, storage, bandwidth etc.)
- important event detection and handling by notifying users, and/or performing automatic corrective actions.
Feedback
Feedback tools represent data and events for users in a convenient (visual, readable, printable) form, allowing them to analyze the situation and react accordingly, or provide automatic action invocation in response. The feedback is provided by generic AggreGate tools like system tree (representing devices, their status and grouping, as well as monitoring tools and server configuration), charts, alerts, reports and queries, and widgets (including specific ones like device maps for geometric and topological network representation). Feedback components can be configured for specific user tasks using standard AggreGate facilities and special configuration tools provided in AggreGate Network Manager.
Standard AggreGate provides a wide choice of actions a user can invoke in response to monitoring event. AggreGate Network Manager add few specific options for network management.
To provide more full-fledged problem-management solution, AggreGate Network Manager can be integrated with virtually any Helpdesk or Trouble Ticketing System.
Asset Management
IT asset management is another typical network management task AggreGate Network Manager also supports. Asset Management plugin allows to associate some asset tracking information with your network devices.
That's all for today... but coming more soon!