It is a 3 cheers moment for ManageEngine OpManager. Yes, we are happy to share with you all that Network Products Guide, industry's technology research and advisory guide has named ManageEngine OpManager as one of the finalists for the 7th Annual 2012 Hot Companies and Best Products Awards program.

OpManager is shortlisted as finalist under the following categories

• Network Management
• IT Products and Services for Enterprise (Large)
• IT Products and Services for Enterprise (Medium)

We take this opportunity to thank the judiciary committee for shortlisting us and our customers for their continued patronage to ManageEngine.

For years the rich functionality, easy-of-use and affordability has made ManageEngine OpManager a well-known player in the SMBs network monitoring and management market space. With its recent Enterprise Edition release, OpManager has attracted the established and emerging enterprise audience as well.

Here are few reference customer implementation documents of OpManager Enterprise Edition:






These exhibit OpManager Enterprise Edition’s ability to scale and provide reliable network management system to the large enterprises network management needs, without compromising on the network visibility, ease of use and affordability.

Thanks again to all and Happy networking,

Look who is chasing malware now. It’s the FBI of the United States. After busting all the bad guys in the world (sometimes even inside countries considered friendly to them) they are now on to a new hunt - the deadliest DNSChanger Trojan malware.

This Trojan malware is considered to be the most massive internet fraud ever. The truth is that the computers affected with the DNSChanger malware is potentially vulnerable to attacks from other viruses and malware. To understand the enormity of this malware, see what TheHackerNews.com had to say about it ( the article ).

“The DNSChanger malware was first discovered around 2007, and since this time has infected millions of computers, around 500,000 of them being in the U.S., and through these computers the criminals have reportedly pulled in around $14 million in stolen funds.”

What really makes this malware big news is that it can block millions of computers from the Internet as early as March 8th.

Though the FBI has shut down the fraudulent DNS network, to make sure the infected user computers continue to access the internet they have setup a temporary DNSChanger Command and Control network with due consent from the court.  This network is nearing its expiry date on March 8th as per the verdict. So, if you use Windows and MacOS, it is advised that you do a complete health check for your system.

 “…Unless the FBI obtains a new court order allowing them to continue operating the temporary network, the network will be turned off. Resulting in millions of computers, world-wide, no longer being able to access the Internet.” – Source TheHackerNews.com

To elude such adversity, FBI published the list of rogue DNS server addresses, along with instructions to manually check whether your system is infected or not. ( The FBI doc )

The list of rogue DNS server addresses published by FBI

85.255.112.0 through 85.255.127.255	77.67.83.0 through 77.67.83.255
67.210.0.0 through 67.210.15.255	213.109.64.0 through 213.109.79.255
93.188.160.0 through 93.188.167.255	64.28.176.0 through 64.28.191.255

Irrespective of whether you are an individual or part of a company, the first thing you have to do is to ensure that the following tasks are completed:

• Secure your Internet gateway i.e. your router or the firewall has the legitimate DNS details provided by your Internet Service Provider (ISP). In other words, your DNS server details should not match any of the server addresses from the rogue DNS server address list.
• Scan your DNS server (For companies), servers and end-user machines for this Trojan and correct them immediately.

The latter is more tedious when you have hundreds and thousands of machines to check, and the problem becomes worse, if you are not a techie. However, it is important that you complete the task to prevent problems later.

Stay safe with ME – A Free Tool from Manage Engine

We at ManageEngine understand this pain and have come-up with a small quick tool that helps detect whether your system is infected or not, in a second.


What if your system is infected?

Visit Trend Micro’s HouseCall for a free scan and clean-up and notify the FBI by submitting this form . You should also contact your Internet Service Provider (ISP) for advice on restoring your legitimate DNS settings.

To avoid such incidents in future, FBI also provides guidelines on the following::

• Securing your browser:  https://www.us-cert.gov/reading_room/securing_browser/
• Protecting your system against malware and Trojan-recovery guidelines for your system: https://www.us-cert.gov/reading_room/trojan-recovery.pdf

So, stay connected to the Internet, prevent  your systems from a Trojan attack. Download this tool and do a self-test on your systems now.

A recent study on what business enterprises expect from a performance management system, has shown that of IT professionals are looking for a solution that offers integrated performance management of both, the physical and the virtual IT infrastructure.

With more and more businesses talking about data consolidation and virtualization in the same breadth, it is clear that the industry acknowledges the huge advantages of embracing virtualization. Moving to virtualization to leverage the operational benefits, the scalability, notable cut on the costs, and improved services, the management needs of the IT infrastructure keep evolving.

Roughly 60% of the IT personnel today have acknowledged using disparate tools for performance monitoring, one for the network, another for virtualized environment, and yet another for physical servers, besides some home-grown scripts..  The data disparity leads to the inevitable blame-game, resulting in compromising of SLAs and increased IT operations cost, and wasted productivity.  As not all the businesses have switched to 100% virtualization, the performance management solutions now face the challenge of having to keep pace with the changing dynamics, and also have one or all of the following capabilities to manage the physical and virtual infrastructure from a single console:

1. Out-of-the-box management of multi-vendor physical and virtual devices
2. A design which allows to expand the scope of the application's custom capabilities.
3. Easy integration with other point products to provide a holistic solution.
4. Useful plug-ins so that the network, server, and virtualization admins have to look-up to just one solution, and stay in sync and look at the same set of data to drill down to the root of a problem..
5. A built-in ability to automate few workflows that significantly brings down the turnaround time..
6. An easy handle to integrate with 3rd party software too when there is a need..
   

ManageEngine OpManager is an integrated physical and virtual IT infrastructure performance management solution, with support for VMWare and Hyper V monitoring, besides monitoring  the resources on physical servers for availability and performance.  If you haven't tried the virtualization modules of OpManager yet, we urge you to test-drive now, and let us know if we can assist you through your evaluation.

Much has been said and written about how important it is for networks to be highly available and how critical it is for a business, given the pace at which an enterprise network grows, and how the dynamics keep evolving and changing over time.  When the networks grow to accommodate the demands of an expanding enterprise business, the enterprise monitoring needs seem to get more and more complex.  Delivering high availability and disaster recovery is the mantra to successful, uninterrupted enterprise network monitoring. In this post, lets see how the high availability of an enterprise network can be ensured..

Ensuring high availability

To ensure uninterrupted enterprise network monitoring, a contingency plan detailing what must be done when there is a system failure or a site failure or maybe even a mishap, is essential. Before we proceed, it helps to understand that a thin line differentiates ‘failover’ from ‘disaster recovery’. Failover is a method employed by most enterprises to ensure that the system availability is resumed within an acceptable time-frame, whereas, ‘disaster recovery’ is a fallback strategy when all the failover strategies break.  Different enterprises employ different failover strategies that can be broadly categorized into cold, warm, or hot standbys, based on what is acceptable to their business.

As the enterprise business (and even those of SMBs) depends largely on the availability of various services, there are no two ways to continuous, uninterrupted network monitoring. As an administrator, you would look at the network monitoring software’s ability to quickly failover in the event of, say, a server crash, which by the way, is one of the myriad possibilities that can lead to interrupted and incomplete monitoring.  The worst of scenarios is where the entire site goes down due to a power outage, or owing to a natural phenomenon like an earth quake or a tsunami (fortunately such events are far and few between and hope that no one gets to suffer such a nightmare!). Whatever maybe the case, disaster preparedness is the only sure-shot way for a business to stay alive.

Failover for Enterprises

In the case of large enterprises, a cold or warm standby will not cut it. A cold start warrants manual intervention and warm start involves a backup running in the background with the data being mirrored to a secondary server at specified intervals. It is possible that the data on both servers is not synchronized all the time.  A hot standby becomes a clear gating factor for a software that manages fault and network performance of critical systems and services.

A hot standby failover is preferred because,

 i) the redundant systems run in parallel with a 100% data synchronization
ii) the users do not experience a glitch as the failover is smooth and almost instant.

Hot-standby in OpManager



More on setting-up single-site and multi-site redundancy in another post..

Have you ever chuckled at a person wearing a full rain coat with the hood but also carrying an umbrella in his hand on a rainy day? Actually, this analogy is no different from your company's Internet service.

With the demand to provide 100% availability for the internet service, every organization goes for multiple Internet services. However due to cost constraints the speed and the bandwidth may vary between service providers. It is obvious, in terms of backup link because you don’t want your users to browse any social or unproductive web sites when your main service link is down.

Recently, I happen to visit one of our customers for training and implementation. Their Internet Service Provider (ISP) had provided them with 3 types of internet services to ensure 100% uptime for their Internet service i.e.

• An Optical Carrier [OC] based internet - Primary
• A Radio Frequency [RF] based internet - Secondary
• A VSAT based internet – Tertiary – Backup link

With these 3 Internet services, the ISP was able to provide high redundancy and availability of services to this customer at all times. All the 3 internet services were always active at any point of time, with the traffic flowing only across OC link primarily.

In the case of primary link going down, the routing table on the core router uses a static route that switches over to the secondary link without any interfaces coming up or changing the IP. Needless to say the ISP's SLA for Network uptime is 97% and is always achieved.

The real catch here is the Response time which is very poor for RF and VSAT links when compared to the OC. Especially with VSAT which has a high latency and a minimum Round Trip Time (RTT) as 550 ms.

The customer was unhappy with the slow internet connectivity with its branches, because at times it took more than 20 minutes to complete a business transaction from the branch offices.

Before upgrading the links or contacting their ISP, the IT team wanted to get all the Ws’ right? I mean…

1. Who causes the delay? Is it the application or users?
2. Whether is it possible to achieve some trade-off in terms of bandwidth usage to provide a better service?
3. Where does the latency happen? Is it at the service provider’s end or something internal?
4. When and for how long has the high latency been prevailing?

The IT team was able to recognize the answers for the first two questions by using Traffic and bandwidth analysis module; NetFlow from ManageEngine. However, they were not aware of Cisco IP SLAs and how it can help them monitor their WAN links.

Similar to NetFlow, Cisco IP SLAs is also a part of Cisco IOS. Cisco IP SLAs uses active monitoring techniques to let you know how the link is performing! To know about the Cisco IP SLAs  features that are supported in the IOS versions click here…

More at http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps6602/products_ios_protocol_group_home.html

I had created the WAN RTT monitors from their core router (Cisco 1841, IOS v12.4) to the branch offices and set a threshold of above 150 ms. This is because the link between the Source and the Destination is always the same and only the quality (Latency/ RTT) of the internet connection changes for OC, RF and VSAT.

Now, if the link latency increases beyond the threshold point, an alarm would be raised immediately to the network team. When they receive an alert from OpManager the first thing they verify these days is the HOP graph, which lets them identify where exactly the high latency was induced.They could also deduce the type of internet service that is currently in use by measuring the RTT as well checking the IP addresses in the HOP graph.

OpManager WAN RTT dashboards, lets administrator monitor the response time and availability round-the-clock. To know more about OpManager’s WAN monitoring, click here…

Now, they use OpManager’s WAN RTT monitoring extensively with over 100 WAN links to monitor.

I am sure this use case will give you a fair idea on where and how we can use OpManager’s WAN RTT monitoring to help eliminate & isolate latency,RTT issues across WAN links.

Signing off for now… and Wishing you happy holidays!

- S Arun Kumar

Image courtesy: chumpysclipart.com

It has been an exciting year at the OpManager bay. With a couple of awards to its credit, OpManager is all set for the next major release in the new year to come. We would like to take this opportunity to thank all our users for the wonderful support extended to us and we look forward to delight you with new features in the coming year!

While there is little doubt that you, our invaluable users, have kept us going, here's a quick summary of what has kept us busy this year:

Our Oscars -2010

Not to blow our own trumpet, but we can do with some nominations, awards, and press attention every now and then :-) The credit goes to you wonderful people for helping us reach here:

1. 2010 Global Product Excellence Award Winners

Info Security Products Guide, the industry's leading information security research and advisory guide, has named OpManager, a winner of the 2010 Global Product Excellence. This customer trust honor is the greatest endorsement to the fact that OpManager is ahead of the curve when it comes to the best of the products that can provide holistic network management.



2. WindowsNetworking.com Readers' Choice Award
 
ManageEngine OpManager was voted WindowsNetworking.com Readers’ Choice Award Winner – Second Runner Up. OpManager becomes the only awardee to have remained in the top 5 ranks over three consecutive years while improving rank position each year.


3. Network Management Software - Review

OpManager really hits the mark for reliable network monitoring. It has a great range of features, and is versatile enough to monitor a wide range of devices. It does a great job alerting administrators to network problems. Read more.


From the Bee-hive

Our developers, the busy-bees in the team, together with the testing team, doled out 8 different releases this year. The release numbers and the highlights are given below:

1. Hotfix 8051 (view details)

• Faster device discovery
• Improved WMI monitoring on 64 bit Windows server OpManager installations
• Intermittent issues with OpManager & SDP integration (both applications in latest builds) have been handled
• Smooth alarm escalation configuration
• French - locale specific issues handled

2. Hotfix 8052 (view details)

• A new CLI-based monitor for Partition Details of a device is included.
• Alarms Details Page Enhancements
• The name of the log rule that triggers alarms for Syslogs, Event Logs and Traps is shown now.
• Provision included to edit the rules.
• Down Time Schedule – Status of the Downtime Schedule (in progress or not) is shown in the schedule listing page.
• Re–branding – Option added to revert back to default settings added

3. NCM Plug-in 5450 (view details)

• Provision for viewing the configuration versions of all/any device(s) by specifying a custom date range
• Provision to mark configuration changes as authorized/unauthorized in bulk
• Support for several new device models.

4. GA release of OpManager 8.7 (view details)

• VMware monitoring and Automated Network Mapping and a host of other features.
  

5. NCM Plug-in 5500 (view details)

• Support for MSSQL back-end  (Note: If you are looking to make use of MSSQL back-end, please upgrade to OpManager 8.7 and apply the latest version of NCM Plug-in over that). 
  
• Support for additional Syslog message formats for real time change detection for Cisco and Enterasys devices
• Support for installing the NCM Plug-in Windows 64-bit machines.

6. Hotfix 8721 - (view details)

• This particular hotfix had a record number of enhancements, changes and fixes.

7. NetFlow Plugin 8500 (view details)

8. Hotfix 8722 - We are a futuristic lot if you have been following our forums. This release is expected in a couple of weeks, a promise we plan to keep this year

We are curious like that!

Well, not exactly prying, but we certainly wanted to have a peep into your network management needs. Here are the few surveys we carried out and each one has yielded a wealth of information and is sure to keep the team on toes for several months from now!

Most of the survey results have been useful development inputs and it has helped align our development goals. Besides, the insights from the surveys were used in a couple of webinars we recently hosted.

• VMware - Most wanted features
• Top virtualization problems
• IT automation survey
• Hyper-V beta signup

The buzz on the web

Webinars this year has turned out a huge hit and thanks again for the overwhelming response. We opted not to host a session this month as you guys have a bigger priority ahead - The holiday season :) 

OpManager Webinars & Videos

• A happy customer speaks!
• Network Performance Management
• Top 5 Server Performance Problems
• VMware Performance Monitoring - The Must Haves   
• ITIL-based Event Management - Best practices
• Microsoft Infrastructure Monitoring
• Monitoring and Managing Everything Cisco
• OpManager Overview
• OpManager Server Monitoring
  

Useful Resources

• Monitoring Templates
• Event Log Monitoring Part I | Part II
• Ensuring High Availability
• Holistic Network Management
• Ten reasons why administrators love OpManager
  

And finally, here's for some stage presence :)

Interop 2010 







Gitex 2010





Thanks for coming this far! Have a happy weekend and a wonderful season ahead!!

Vidya Vasudevan
OpManager Team

Create your own Toon

Go shopping, catch your favorite game of Football, party hard, or simply chill out this Thanksgiving..

With OpManager SmartPhone GUI, manage IT from anywhere, anytime. Check out the iPhone GUI:




Happy Thanksgiving!

Vidya
OpManager Team

OpManager has a long list of WMI monitors that cover even Active Directory, MSSQL, Exchange etc. Here are a few self-learned tips to solve some of those common WMI issues easily. 

First, the WMI Diagnosis Utility-all out troubleshooter.

WMI Tools include: 

WMI CIM Studio: view and edit classes, properties, qualifiers, and instances in a CIM repository; run selected methods; generate and compile MOF files. 

WMI Object Browser: view objects, edit property values and qualifiers, and run methods.