Category: Expert opinion

Delayed Batch Operations

It's often necessary to perform a similar operation with thousands of your devices, regardless of whether they are online and functioning properly at the moment.

AggreGate was always offering a capability of delayed configuration changes: you can configure a thousand devices and your configuration changes will be delivered on "best effort" basis. But what if you need to execute an operation, e.g. perform a firmware upgrade? Continue reading Delayed Batch Operations

Workflows Module is Coming Soon

Workflows Coming AggreGate 5.3 will feature a long-waited Workflows module. Workflows are user-defined actions that combine server-side data processing operations and operator interaction steps (UI Procedures). The workflows module helps to define those actions by adding various steps that may depend to each other and benefit from conditional branching.

Workflows are ideal for configuring various incident resolution and debriefing patterns that will be interactively launched upon various alerts. Thus, workflows will be crucial for any AggreGate-based umbrella monitoring and management project, be it IT, automation or security infrastructure management.

Comprehensive support for management of Telecom and Corporate networks via AggreGate Network Manager

Do you know that besides providing network monitoring capabilities our AggreGate Network Manager is offering comprehensive support for management of Telecom and Corporate networks?

Wanna know how can it make changes to your net and control it? Check the new Network Management page.

Designing AggreGate-based Products

As you probably know, AggreGate is typically used by VARs, SIs and OEMs for building reference solutions or even full-fledged derived products. Technically, each derived OEM solution is a set of plugins for:

  • Acquiring data from devices and data sources
  • Storing data on the server
  • Processing data in headless mode
  • Visualizing data via custom AggreGate-based operator UIs
  • Exposing data to third-party applications.

Many simple solutions only include server-side processing templates and parts of operator UI, such as widgets, maps, reports and dashboards. Such solutions acquire data via standard protocols and keep it in default storages, such as relational, NoSQL and RRDB databases.

We've recently posted a short article that describes how to package your custom processing and visualization tools into an AggreGate plugin. The article requires basic understanding of AggreGate Plugin SDK. Please check it here.

An out-of-the-box PDU monitoring is available in AggreGate

Now a PDU monitoring is available in AggreGate out-of-the-box right after the server installation. AggreGate collects common PDU information, like model, firmware version, series number, etc. Besides, the system is able to monitor more important PDU parameters, such as current force, voltage, active and total power.

PDU monitoring

Try out all AggreGate features by downloading our free trial version here.

OPC manual tags support

We've added manual tags support to our OPC device driver. This feature is a rescue in case of legacy OPC servers that do not support items browsing. Simply add desired item IDs to the 'Manual Items' device property and these items will be directly requested from the device upon each synchronization. Manual tags will be available at the device configuration, next to auto-discovered tags if any.

The full list of available device drivers is available in Protocols/Drivers section on our website.

Visualizing Device Groups on Network Maps

We’ve recently added support for displaying device groups on geographical and topological maps. Devices can be combined into groups and each group is associated with specific geographic coordinates and links to other groups or individual devices.

This new feature allows to design multi-level maps with drill-down capabilities. Imagine a company that provides technical services for Base Telecom Stations in a certain geographical region. Each BTS is a group of devices that includes power management units, security devices, telecom equipment, environment sensors and controllers, etc. Base stations are connected to each other by communication channels, and station-to-station links can be configured through a Topology section of a device group matching each BTS.

Visualizing Device Groups on Network Maps

Operators get a map that displays stations and their communication channels, as well as overall status of all equipment in each BTS. They can navigate from the map to BTS overview screens and then down to individual device dashboards.

You can get more information about AggreGate Network Manager capabilities here.

Check a New Article About AggreGate Performance and Scalability

AggreGate Platform was designed with unlimited scalability in mind. While communication with a million devices definitely requires multiple servers to get joined into a distributed installation, but even a single AggreGate Server can demonstrate impressive performance figures. Read the full article here.