You just hear a buzz and you know its your network calling. Continue to party or enjoy your best friend's wedding even as you attend to an alarm over your iPhone! Collaborate with your team and speed up the resolution time by getting to the root of a problem from anywhere using OpManager Smartphone GUI.
The latest release of OpManager features an interface for the latest generation of smartphones. OpManager 8.5 automatically detects the type, make and model of the accessing mobile phone or Personal Digital Assistant and redirects the user’s browser to the correct interface. Perform the first-level of troubleshooting from wherever you are using the smartphone interface that lets you access the devices in your network, attend to alarms, drill down a fault, and view the performance of your network resources.
If carrying the network in your pocket is not cool enough, we have OpManager sending alerts as Direct Messages to your Twitter accounts besides the option to receive network alerts via RSS feeds, taking network fault management to a new level!
So what are you waiting for? Upgrade to our latest release and feel the power!
Though this downturn has forced organizations to concentrate on cutting costs, it has in turn helped optimize their spending. The Green IT revolution and wide acceptance of virtualization across organizations of every size has made this fact very clear.
Presently, the focus on Datacenter Power Management has not seen its limelight in the market. Moving forward this will be mandatory in every Datacenter operation. No doubt, it is an additional responsibility for the administrator to monitor them as well. ‘Green IT’, if not in terms of conserving the world, at least saves thousands of dollars spent on power.
This fact was accredited by a Gartner survey made in the recent past. This survey also suggests methods to save power. However for this blog post, I’m considering only few methods, which can be achieved with zero or lesser spending.
In other words, how to save on energy with just by monitoring and managing servers and infrastructure devices?
1. Optimize usage of under-utilized servers: Identify the under-utilized servers and consolidate the utilization across applications. E.g. an under-utilized application server can be shared with another application or the related database in the same box, thus saving additional server and its powering cost.
2. Think twice before adding new resources: Consider current operation efficiency and project trends before buying new resources. It is recommended to have at least 20% reserve of server resources to meet any contingencies.
3. Identify and Replace Legacy Servers When you get a chance: To get to this point, the very first information you need is a complete server Inventory and resource utilization details for every individual server. A tool to discover all your servers and monitor their health and performance becomes essential.
4. Virtualize: In recent times, this is one of the hot projects carried out by administrators. The ability to quickly swap resources across different guest OSs based on the shift in usage pattern and upgrading without downtime has saved a lot to the management. Though it involves initial investment, it is not huge when compared to the investment returns.
It is always suggested to start your virtualization small and later spread it across your network. It is also essential to consider the nature of application that you wish to virtualize.
5. Use Tools/ Techniques to measure Datacenter environment: Typically Datacenter contains Racks with power distribution units, Cooling system, UPS, Generators, Environment monitoring devices such as Temperature sensors and cameras, with most of these devices supporting SNMP. A network monitoring software with support for private MIBs should enable you to monitor every parameter exposed by the vendors.
It is evident that a network monitoring software is essential with capabilities to
That exactly is what OpManager gives you.
Don’t go by my words. Explore the 30 day free trial in your infrastructure and let me know what you feel about it.
Download our free 30 day trial.
Learn more about OpManager capabilities on Server Monitoring.
-Kalvin
We recently had a few customers and prospects asking us about managing SQL clusters, Exchange clusters etc. Clustering, as we know is just another commonly implemented strategy to reduce service downtime and the administrators have to work over and above this to ensure high availability.
Here is the procedure to monitor clustered nodes in your network.
Let us consider a two-node SQL cluster for example:
Steps
Discover
1. Add the Active node in OpManager for discovery. The node is discovered and the Virtual IP through which external networks access the cluster nodes, is discovered as an interface in the Active node.
2. Go to the device snapshot page of the Active node and remove this interface.
3. Add the Passive node for discovery now. Both, the Active and Passive nodes are discovered as standalone nodes in OpManager.
4. Add the Virtual Server IP as another device.
Group and Monitor
Visualize the cluster by grouping the primary and the standby node along with the virtual server in a business view. Monitor the Virtual server to ensure the service availability. You can continue to monitor the standalone Active and Passive nodes to determine the resource performances.
Resources to be monitored on a cluster
It is always interesting to know the different styles of bandwidth management practiced. Here is another interesting tip for effective bandwidth management.
Let your users manage their bandwidth
Wait! Don’t let your eyebrows go up and think "it's crazy", absolutely not… Have you ever let your end-users know about how much bandwidth they use for their personal entertainment? This makes users cautious about their bandwidth exploitation and is a big start in managing your bandwidth.
If you have not tried this before, try it out and find the top 10 bandwidth users in your network. Just let them know about how much bandwidth they have used unproductively. You will be surprised to see them restrict their usage considerably.
However to know this information, you need a tool that...
This and even deeper network traffic analysis is what OpManager NetFlow plug-in gives you. Here is the quick work flow on how to do get this report….
Now, allow them to manage their own bandwidth...
Don’t forget to see our Part I of bandwidth management tips, click here…
Click here to download the 30 day free trial and see how it works in your environment...
Feel free to add you comments, cheers and happy networking.
-Kalvin
It’s that last day of the year when everyone gets into retrospection mood (atleast for the first half of the day before we head out to the wildest party of the year). So before we call it a day and a year here at OpManager, here’s a quick 2009 retro: 4 major OpManager service pack releases, a Network Configuration Management Plug-in, real-time performance graphs, network monitoring failover, 64-bit support, the VMware Technology Alliance Partnership, our Distributed Edition winning over many huge enterprise networks like Lloyds TSB’s and Arkadin’s, a customizable dashboard that’s making OpManager fans everyday.. I’ll stop myself here or it will be 2010 already! If you are interested in a detailed list do check out our Read Me page.
While many think of 2009 as the year that saw a lot of job losses, budget freezes and worry-lines, there are a lot of us who used the opportunity to make even faster profits; striking off unproductive expenditure, multi-tasking and implementing new technologies(cloud-computing, virtualization, datacenter consolidation etc). It all came down to whether one was bold enough to question expensive status quo and from there dare to explore and implement. Like the Knight in Indiana Jones Last Crusade who said: “You must choose. But choose wisely.” For as the True Grail will bring you life -- the False Grail will take it from you.”
I'll sign off with our best customer testimonial of 2009 and a short ManageEngine video which we hope will prod you to ask questions, save costs and make yourselves a whole new, refreshing 2010. Wishing all our readers a 2010 that’s peaceful and prosperous.
"...There is a greater ROI with OpManager than with the other more costly monitoring systems like Tivoli, OpenView or SCCM’s Operations Manager. Not to mention the ease of installation and configuration as compared to OpenView or Tivoli ..."
– David Henry, System administrator, AOSmith Electrical Products Company
Obviously
the easy way out is to buy more bandwidth, especially now when most of the service
providers have reduced the bandwidth prices. But is that an affordable solution
always!!! Because in the due course the prices might crawl back up…Is there
anything that we can do about bandwidth without shelling-out more dollars?
Refer to
our whitepaper on “Slow
Applications Despite Frequent Bandwidth Upgrades?”
Here are
some key find outs…
1.
Limit Email to Text: Though it seems simple to have
all the mail in Text only format, when compare to HTML or both, certainly this will save
a huge amount of bandwidth. (Think every email across your organization and the
amount of bandwidth used to load those thick graphics….!)
“Restricting
email to text is an obvious way [to save bandwidth] that no one does,” Skorupa
says. “In the body of an email, there are almost always rich forwarding,
graphics, company logos, and everything else when, instead, just plain-old
everyday text will work fine.”
If you use Outlook, you can even
try the suggestion below. (After-all no one reads all the emails that is
delivered to their mail client 
)
Activate cache mode for email clients.
One way enterprises can free up bandwidth is by running their email clients in cache mode, says Joe Skorupa, a research vice president for Gartner. “Outlook has a cache mode that only downloads stuff when you look at it,” he says. “When you do that, you don’t get that crunch the first thing in the morning when people turn on their PCs.”
2.
Get Policies To Work: Most of the employees never
prefer this option. Rather, you can prioritize your traffic giving no room for social
networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc… to bog down your business
critical application traffic.
Check out our recent
blog on “Are social networking sites guzzling your company bandwidth?”
3.
Analyze bandwidth usage: “You can’t manage what you can’t
see”, it is true even to bandwidth management. Use network traffic analysis tools that can help you get indepth information
about your network, like which user or application is using the traffic. Interestingly at times, even the user might not
know that he is clogging the network. Being the network administrator, you can
find and correct these situations before it becomes a crisis.
With the combination of OpManager
and its NetFlow plug-in, you can now analyze the network traffic to know which
application or user is occupying the traffic, in addition to the router health
and bandwidth utilization monitoring.
Learn more on using OpManager for
Network
Performance Management or Click here
to try a 30 day free trial.
See you with more tips on network monitoring and management.
-Kalvin
In a recent article published
in Network World, John.E.Dunn discusses how Youtube and Facebook have
an enormous impact on the corporate bandwidth. They surveyed 19 billion
URL's visited by 30,000 end users and here are their findings.
According
to this article, over 21.5% of total bandwidth is being used by the
social networking sites. At ManageEngine we have seen this first-hand
when helping customers with their Network performance management
problems - the usual suspects are Youtube, facebook and sometimes Bit
Torrent clients.
Most
companies are not aware of how their bandwidth is being used and how
the usage of these social networking sites impact the performance of
business critical applications. As suggested in the article, its very
important to have a system in place to monitor the bandwidth usage and
prioritize the business critical applications.
If
you are interested in getting such a solution in place in your company,
you can see the sample screenshot below to understand how OpManager
along with the Netflow plug-in provides you visibility into your WAN
pipes to understand which user or which application is using your
bandwidth.
As
you can see in the sample screen shot, 93% of traffic is being used by
Youtube. So you can monitor the bandwidth as well as which
application and user is using it. Check out Opmanager's network traffic analysis with the NetFlow Plug-in for more info.
--
Pravin
Team OpManager - The Network Monitoring Software from ManageEngine
Unknown != Uninstall
We come across this question very frequently: "My devices are being listed as unknown, how do I monitor them?". Let's see how to monitor these devices.
Why it happens?
Each
type of device has a unique id known as the sysOID which is used to
identify the type of device via SNMP (similar to MAC addresses for
devices). In OpManager, we have a list of sysOIDs along with their
device types available under 'Device Templates'.
Whenever a device gets added with SNMP, OpManager checks the sysOID of
the device and tries matching it with the ones available and if
it matches, the appropriate device type will be applied. If SNMP
credentials are not provided properly or if the sysOID of the device is
not available in OpManager, the device will be listed as unknown.
We
keep adding a new device template every time a customer comes up with a
requirement and then make it available in the subsequent releases (We
have over 600 device templates so far). We are also working on options
for sharing templates among users. But until then, read below to know
how to monitor your 'unknown' devices.
What should you do?
I
guess its clear now on why it is being listed as unknown, so let me
explain a few ways to get the template for these unknown devices.
1. The most easiest way is to post your requirement in this FORUM POST and we will add the template for the device in the next release.
2.
If you want to add the template for the device immediately, follow the
steps below to create a new template. Let's take CISCO BPX SES Wan
switch as an example
a. In the OpManager web client, go to Admin --> Device Templates --> New Template.
b.
Provide details of the new template: vendor (add a new vendor if not ),
category, monitoring interval, choose an appropriate representative
image and then click 'Query Device' from where you can add the SysOID
details for the device. Under Query device, enter the Device Name/IP
address, the correct SNMP Port Number, SNMP Version and Community
String of the device and click Query. You can now apply the newly
created template to other similar type devices which were earlier
listed as unknown. Similar devices added henceforth will automatically
be classified using the correct device type. No more unknown!
Now
that the devices are classified properly under the new device template,
you will want to monitor performance counters on the devices. To do
this, you need to add a custom SNMP monitor to the template by getting
the appropriate MIB for the device. Cisco has made it simple by introducing this SITE
for downloading MIBs for different device types. If it is going to be a
different vendor, you can do a google search for the MIBS or contact
the vendor directly and get the MIBS for the device. Once you have the
MIBS, you can follow the steps HERE to create custom SNMP monitors.
Now
you may ask why this title?! I have seen a few of our customers
uninstalling because their devices were listed as unknown and I just
wanted to explain how simple it is to create a new template and solve
the problem.
--
Pravin
Team OpManager - The Network Monitoring Software from ManageEngine
Hi Everyone,
Here is a step-by-step screenshot presentation on How to enable SNMP on Windows Servers. Hope you find this useful.
This is just a new initiative and more to follow from now…
If you are a beginner trying to understanding what is SNMP? Then I’m sure you will find our SNMP Tutorial informative. Check the tutorial at "http://www.manageengine.com/products/opmanager/what-is-snmp.html"
-
Kalvin
Team OpManager - The Network Monitoring Software from ManageEngine
Quite often we get this query from our evaluators and customers. We already have this data exposed in the OpManager knowledgebase; however I thought it would be nice to do a blog on it as well.
To analyze bandwidth consumption, we ran OpManager in an isolated environment and monitored the devices as listed below
Servers are monitored through WMI with default monitors
(CPU, Memory & Disk) associated.
Monitors like CPU, Memory and Interfaces Rx & Tx Traffic/ Utilization/ Errors/
Discards are associated to Network Devices (like Switches, Routers, Printers
and Firewalls) by default.
Monitoring Interval is set to 1 minute for all monitors and the status polling
is also set to 1 minute.
Here is the report for you...
UDP Traffic: 5225 bps
TCP/ WMI Traffic: 39435 bps
ICMP Traffic: 1980 bps (18 bps per device)
So, OpManager generates a total traffic of approximately 47Kbps within the LAN in order to monitor 100 Servers, 3 Routers, 3 Switches, 2 Firewalls and 2 Printers.
Hope you find this information useful.
One more info…Recently, we brought
out a new SNMP tutorial for beginners.
Do check out the animated gifs to explain SNMP communication for
various commands like GET, TRAP and INFORM.
-
Kalvin
Team OpManager- The Network Monitoring Software from ManageEngine
Corp