As the head sales honcho here at Graphical Networks, I’m constantly answering questions about our products. Since I answer so many questions, I figured why not go ahead and create a blog series on the top five questions about netTerrain. In this article, I’ll discuss netTerrain Logical, our software for network diagrams and automated network documentation.
Before I dive in, however, allow me to give you some quick background on netTerrain.
We offer netTerrain in two flavors: netTerrain Logical and netTerrain DCIM. We also offer two add-on modules: netTerrain OSP (can be added on to either netTerrain Logical or DCIM) and netTerrain Environmental Monitoring Module (add-on to netTerrain DCIM). You can read more about netTerrain’s structure, and how it’s all priced, here.
Question:
Does netTerrain Logical include a network discovery engine to automate the population of my network devices and connections?
Yes! The netTerrain Collector and Integration Toolkit is included in netTerrain Logical.
The Collector houses our SNMP network discovery engine, which uses: SNMP, LLDP, CDP, WMI, and other protocols to go out and discover your devices and connections and depict them in a logical, topology type web diagrams.
With the Layer 2 discovery, you will be able to see the IP Address, MAC Address, and from port number to port number — you can also set up a polling interval to schedule the discovery.
In addition to network discovery, netTerrain provides adapters to leading management systems, using Rest APIs, such as: Solarwinds Orion NPM, CA Spectrum, AWS, Azure, ServiceNow, and others.
Question:
If I get netTerrain Logical, does that also mean we get netTerrain DCIM too?
No: you will need to upgrade to DCIM. That doesn’t mean you need to build another server. It is just a matter of providing a new license key. But, if you get netTerrain DCIM, it does include netTerrain Logical. Does make sense…or did I lose everyone? If you have specific questions, shoot us an email here or give us a call at +1-240-912-6223.
Question:
Does netTerrain Logical come with nodes and devices?
Yes. netTerrain is built using our extensive catalog of objects, which is constantly being updated. Node objects are used to build the hierarchical drill down diagrams, like sites, buildings, floors, and rooms.
Device objects are used to show ports, cards, slots of the physical chassis of an equipment, such as patch panels, servers, routers, switches, PDUs.
Question:
What is included in netTerrain DCIM — that is not included in netTerrain Logical?
There are three main features in our DCIM software that are not included in netTerrain Logical. If you need any of the following in addition to netTerrain Logical, you may need netTerrain DCIM instead.
The features in DCIM, not Logical, are as follows:
- Rack Catalog:the racks in the netTerrain catalog are meant to be used for documenting the rack’s space capacity, weight availability, and name plate power capacity. It provides the ability to snap the equipment and consume the rack space (this is why it is geared towards DCIM).
- WOM (Work Order Management): a task or a job for a customer, that can be scheduled or assigned to someone to complete. netTerrain WOM allows management to track and manage all work order information, including creating work orders, updating requests, and tracking work completion.
- Dashboard Reports: the dashboard reports are skewed more towards data center capacity reports (space, rack, power) and asset reports.
Question:
What types of network diagrams I can create in netTerrain Logical?
The answer to this is: as many types as you can dream up and imagine. Really. Many of our customers use netTerrain Logical to create network topology maps. Others use it to document office space, telecom rooms, equipment rooms. And some document workflow type diagrams, application views, views of their cloud infrastructure. Heck, we even have customers document its military equipment and all the associated equipment that a particular division, or brigade, has.
To sum up, the above are the top 5 most commonly asked questions about netTerrain Logical, our network diagramming/documentation flavor of netTerrain.If you have more questions, you can request a demo/15 minute discovery call here, shoot us an email here or give us a call at +1-240-912-6223.
In the next post in this series, we’ll discuss netTerrain OSP (for Outside Plant management). Stay tuned!