We recently heard from a prospective customer who asked us, “can I integrate with other tools such as CRM, NMS, and BMS?”.
Good question! How easy is integration with DCIM software?
In this blog, we’ll try and answer this by giving you a look at how integration with our software (netTerrain DCIM) works. Keep in mind that not all DCIM is the same, however, I hope that this gives you an idea of what DCIM can do (when it’s built to be flexible and easy for users to customize as needed).
netTerrain DCIM is software that’s built for easy integration. netTerrain can integrate with an unlimited number of tools and data sources. To make integration as seamless and easy as possible for our users, netTerrain gives you numerous pre-built integrations for tools such as ServiceNow, AWS, VCenter, CA Spectrum, and more. Need to import or export spreadsheets, Visio, KMZ, PDF files, and the like? You can do that with a couple of clicks by utilizing netTerrain’s import and export tools. Need to connect to a database? You can utilize the netTerrain Integration Toolkit (ITK).
netTerrain’s Collector houses our discovery engine: this discovery engine supports a myriad of options such as: SNMP, CDP, LLDP, WMI, and NMAP. Using the Collector, you can automatically discover your devices and properties, custom MIBs, connections, etc.
Need to integrate with tools for which we don’t currently have pre-existing connectors? That’s easy, too! You can use our extensible and well-documented APIs. Hundreds of methods are available for developers to read and write data. Our APIs are meant to be used — to this end, they are secure, heavily-documented, abstracted in its own “layer” and follow certain standards (such as RESTful).
We have quite a few customers who are using our API with their home grown systems. In these cases, they are not so much using an API from a vendor (such as Solarwinds) but using the netTerrain API to make the netTerrain software behave in a certain way. You know…the important stuff: “Sit, heel, role over and so on. Ha…like a good dog” (….I just wanted to see if you were paying attention). But, to be serious, you can add objects, update data, delete objects, and the list goes on. The netTerrain API can help you highly automate documentation. So, if you have a collection of data that describes your network then you can use the netTerrain API to automate the network documentation.
Bottomline? If you need to integrate existing tools and data into your new DCIM software platform, be sure that the software you’re looking at is up to the task (our mostly vendor-agnostic guide to choosing the right DCIM software for your needs can give you a few hints). And, to beat our own chests here a bit because what is a corporate blog without that, you may want to consider netTerrain DCIM. To learn more about how easy netTerrain makes integration, check out our recent case study here (or just read the blog-version). If you’d like to test-drive netTerrain and get a demo (for free), click here to get started.