Considering a software program to document your network, your data centers inventory, and your cabling? Have you outgrown tools like Visio and spreadsheets and you’re ready to find a centralized, visual repository to view, search, report, and find information quickly? If you are, you may be curious as to how other organizations are using netTerrain and finding success.
In this blog post, we’ll highlight three recent case studies: we interviewed netTerrain users to find out how they’re using netTerrain in the field — how they came to choose netTerrain, what their goals were, how deployment went, and, finally, how successful the project is.
Case Study #1: 3rd-Party Apps Like Solarwinds and ServiceNow Visualized in Clicks
Do you use ServiceNow? If you do, keep reading.
One of our customers, a major university in Canada, had been using a documentation tool that had served them well for many years, but it had become outdated as it was unable to integrate with third-party apps.
They needed a tool that would allow them to visualize ServiceNow, which served as the team’s single source of truth. The tool had to be powerful, fit their budget, and had to be deployed without a significant investment of manpower.
Because netTerrain offers pre-built connectors to multiple third-party apps, including ServiceNow, it was selected. One employee, working on the project part-time, was able to implement it. Because netTerrain offers filtering options, the employee was able to ensure that only necessary information was brought into netTerrain by filtering out anything extraneous.
Today, the team can now visualize their netTerrain diagrams with ServiceNow data and can search for any network information in just seconds.
- Read more about their successful project here
Case Study #2: Time Saved, Value Demonstrated to Managers/Customers
One of our customers works as a contractor for various clients in construction. They often take over installation projects and see them to completion. They design and configure how data center equipment is placed and connected.
Now that they’re using an automated IT visualization program (netTerrain), they’re saving a ton of time by not having to document by hand — additionally, they can now give their clients beautiful diagrams that make sense of the network at the click of a button.
Because they use the Cloud-based version of netTerrain, they are able to easily view their projects without extra costs or additional installations.
- Read more about their successful project here
Case Study #3: Workflow Transformed Through Access, Collaboration
A customer, who is a leading global energy supplier, was dealing with big headaches from siloed departments and stranded information. Instead of two data center teams working together, each team used their own tools and didn’t have a bridge to connect the information. Thanks to netTerrain, they’ve bridged the information gap: today, the two teams can access their IT documentation from any web browser. They can share information with a click, and gain insights just as easily.
They were able to automate the population of their data from connecting Spectrum (Broadcom; formerly CA), ServiceNow, and VMWare vCenter into netTerrain. With netTerrain’s API’s, they were able to create their own custom mobile app (netTerrain also has a mobile app too).
- Read more about their successful project here
To sum up: automation and moving away from the manual effort of updating the data and diagrams will ensure that you will always have the most up-to-date data, removing a barrier in getting started with population of the data, and your network engineers and Data Center Manager can really focus on what they need to get done, instead of spending time updating diagrams.