Working with Cables & Strands in Outside Plant Software
By Jan Durnhofer - September 20, 2018Up until now, links in netTerrain have been quite simplistic in terms of how they are modeled: just choose a look and feel for the link, assign some properties and, if needed, apply some rules (visual overrides) to some of those properties. This works well for virtually all network mapping and most Data Center Infrastructure…
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DCIM PUE and alternative facts
By Jan Durnhofer - September 10, 2018Before we deconstruct the loaded title of this blog — ‘DCIM PUE and alternative facts’ — let’s first remove any mutual mystification around these two acronyms: PUE and DCIM. Or at least, let’s try… PUE stands for ‘Power Usage Effectiveness’. It measures the total amount of energy used by a data center to the total…
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How to Translate netTerrain to Klingon – DCIM, Outside Plant, Network Mapping
By Jan Durnhofer - July 20, 2018Every once in a while, we all need to translate something into Klingon. With netTerrain, you can do this. In this blog (and video – click here to watch it), you’ll learn how to localize strings in netTerrain: in other words, how you can translate netTerrain DCIM, Logical (networking mapping), and OSP (outside plant software)…
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Dashboards for DCIM, Outside Plant, and Network Mapping Software
By Jan Durnhofer - June 25, 2018netTerrain Dashboards (also called reports) are collections of gadgets showing aggregated data from the netTerrain database. These dashboards are accessed from the netTerrain project with a simple click (as we will see below). Whether it’s for DCIM, network mapping and documentation, or outside plant dashboards offer a very powerful visual way of aggregating and displaying…
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Manage Your Outside Plant with Dynamic Maps: Importing KML / KMZ maps
By Jan Durnhofer - June 8, 2018In this blog, the 5th installment to our series on managing your outside plant with dynamic maps, we’ll show how you can bring existing outside plant data into netTerrain. If you already have outside plant data in Google Earth (or another tool that supports exports to KML or KMZ formats), you can leverage this data…
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Automagic Calculations for DCIM, OSP, and Network Mapping
By Jan Durnhofer - June 7, 2018In this blog on automatic calculations (using our DCIM, outside plant, and network diagramming software), we’ll review what we call ‘expressions’ in netTerrain. Expressions are functions you can create in netTerrain using transact SQL to compute or aggregate any sort of scale or value — and retrieve it in a property. You may want to…
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Manage Your Outside Plant: Tracing Circuits
By Jan Durnhofer - June 4, 2018In this 4th segment (and video) of our series on managing your outside plant with dynamic maps, you will learn to trace a cable in our outside plant software netTerrain. In the previous segments in this OSP series, you learned how to: create a map in netTerrain OSP software, how to add objects to it…
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How to Reserve Resources in DCIM, Network Documentation, & OSP
By Jan Durnhofer - May 30, 2018In this blog, and accompanying video, you’ll learn how to reserve resources in netTerrain. Time and time again, we’ve seen countless situations in which our customers need to reserve a resource in netTerrain without making it active — while still being able to see the resource reserve reflected in the diagrams. Maybe a user wants…
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Manage Your Outside Plant: Mapping Fiber Strands in a Splice Box
By Jan Durnhofer - May 29, 2018In this article and video, the third segment in our series on managing your outside plant with dynamic maps, you will learn how to apply netTerrain OSP to a very common scenario in GPON network mapping and fiber documentation: creating fiber strands and mapping them to a duct (you can click here to watch the…
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Manage Your Outside Plant with Dynamic Maps: Manholes, Conduits, Ducts
By Jan Durnhofer - May 14, 2018Welcome back to our series on managing your outside plant with dynamic maps: in this second installment in the series, you’ll learn how to place manholes, conduits, and ducts within your outside plant diagrams. In the introduction to this series, you got an overview of how you can create maps in netTerrain. To recap, these…
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Manage Your Outside Plant with Dynamic Maps (Intro)
By Jan Durnhofer - March 15, 2018Need an easier way to document and map your fiber backbone? netTerrain OSP*, our outside plant management platform, is used by our customers to manage their inside and outside plants — from fiber splices to manholes to GIS-enabled street views (with 6-decimal precision) all the way to fiber patch panels inside buildings. This blog series…
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The DCIM Competitive Analysis Gone Wrong (Part Two)
By Jan Durnhofer - February 27, 2018This article continues our previous blog on why we don’t engage in competitive analyses; it is designed to give you an example of why an ‘us vs. them’ DCIM vendor comparison fails. Let’s break it down. First, here’s a link to a competitive analysis on netTerrain from another vendor (who’s never used netTerrain). Now, let’s…
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