Solving the Time Maze – in a MUCH easier way!

 What is a Time maze?? Also known as the time zone, It is the mathematical puzzle one has to solve when trying to relate to some other time zones. 

Who goes through the maze? Network managers / admins, when they have to relate to other time zones, for troubleshooting network traffic issues or to check on the spike in bandwidth utilization in devices spread across various part of the world. NetFlow analyzer takes care of this detail. 

Say, you (network admin / manager)  are working for a large enterprise which is head quartered at New York and has branch offices in London, Paris and Athens ( Disclaimer : I don’t have anything against or for these countries, I picked these names coz the above image has these names! ). You come across an issue at a particular time, reported to you by the network engineer at a branch office. You want to see the network traffic in branch office’s time zone. And you DO NOT want to go through the Time maze. What do you do?!

To go in to the details of this, I need to explain three different concepts :

• Device groups
• User management
• Time zone settings

Device groups:
NetFlow Analyzer helps you to group devices / interfaces as single entity. Device groups help in ease of monitoring and can be assigned to a particular network admin / engineer. The hierarchical view helps in easy understanding of network devices.

User Management:
This allows the assigning of role based access to network admin and engineers. In an ideal setup, a network manager creates device groups, say, for different branch offices and assigns one group to one network admin / engineer. Therefore, when the particular network admin / engineer logs in, only the assigned devices can be viewed by him. NetFlow analyzer also helps him to set time zone for his login. An user can be assigned to various device groups and/or IP groups. Different access levels can also be set.

Time Zone Settings:
Network Admin monitoring devices from France can set the time zone to France, whereas others can have their own time settings for their respective logins.

Solution:
In case there is a network issue and it gets escalated, a network manager(in the US) might want to take a look at that particular router(in France) or interface. And of course, without the hassles of having to solve the time zone maze. Issue is known to have occurred between 3:00 PM to 4:00 PM. To view the traffic in the French router, all that a network admin has to do is, go to the time zone settings and change the time zone to France. Once that is done, all the traffic and other details will be shown in the new time zone and it makes it much easier for the network manager to view and troubleshoot the issue without having to go through the maze.

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Cheers
Joe
http://www.twitter.com/josephjay