Using a Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) solution? Whether it’s something free (like OpenDCIM) or something you paid for, there may come a time when you decide you need something that your current DCIM solution doesn’t offer, or if your DCIM vendor has moved on to focus on other products and is not supporting its DCIM software any longer (read more about how to avoid this pitfall when choosing a DCIM vendor by clicking here).

If you’re considering making the jump from one DCIM solution to another, you may be thinking: “how much of a headache is it going to be to get everything moved over?”.

The truth is, it depends on the software you select. We make netTerrain DCIM, so though we can’t give you the perspective on other solutions, in this article we’ll look at how it works with netTerrain

Import Your Existing Data

netTerrain offers a variety of importing utilities to import your existing data, that makes onboarding easy for our new users, whether they have never used a platform or are switching from a different platform. There are various ways, including ODBC connections to a database and REST APIs to connect to third party applications. With NetDoc, for example, which is a cable management software platform that is being pushed to end-of-life, our software engineers were able to create a connector to import the NetDoc database and import the data into netTerrain. This means, all the data that you worked on inputting into NetDoc, can all be easily transferred into netTerrain, without losing their data. Another DCIM vendor migration we have seen include iTracs — and we have a process in place to import its data, too.

Connect to Your Commercial Tools in Minutes

With the REST API connections, this leads to our netTerrain Collector. The netTerrain Collector offers a suite of pre-built connectors to commonly used commercial network tools such as SolarWinds Orion, Broadcom Spectrum, and ServiceNow. These connectors mean that integrating with your network tools can happen in just a few clicks. What if you have a homegrown tool? That’s easy too: our heavily documented and extensible APIs are user-friendly. Have a public or hybrid infrastructure? netTerrain Collector also houses its Azure, AWS, and VMWare connectors.

Automatically Discover the Network

Collect netTerrain Collector also houses network discovery using SNMP, NMAP, and WMI. If you need to start from scratch as your data in your DCIM tool is old and outdated, you can utilize netTerrain’ s network discovery to discover your network assets and connections. You will not have the issue of knowing if these data center and network diagrams are outdated.

Import Spreadsheets with the Click of a Button

Besides the ODBC and REST API connectors and network discovery, you can also use netTerrain’s spreadsheet import utility. You will need to follow our hierarchical template, so you can create the entire data center floor, racks, equipment inside the racks, and its connections, all in a spreadsheet. Just click on “spreadsheet import”, and in a few minutes, you’ll see your data center diagrams in netTerrain!

From importing your legacy databases, to making connections to your third party network monitoring and Service Desk CMDB tools, to importing your spreadsheets, netTerrain offers many ways to import your DCIM solution and easily migrate your data that doesn’t take months to implement. Interested in learning more about netTerrain and/or a free trial? It’s easy: just click here.

About Fred Koh

As a seasoned sales executive, Fred Koh serves as Director of Sales and is responsible for Graphical Networks sales and channel partner program, marketing strategy, and operations.