Do you work on the network? If you do, you already know that network change is constant…and proper change management prevents headaches down the road! Change management policies that require changes are documented along with the software you need to document them can help keep network chaos at bay and network work orders are a huge piece in the sanity puzzle!
Do you have a network change management process in place?
Change management is important to document as, afterall, how would you know what changes were made with plugging/unplugging cables from ports, placing/moving/decommissioning equipment inside racks of your data centers/telecom rooms, how do you reserve ports and slots inside the network racks? Managing network and data center capacity can be a nightmare if these are not documented. Even if you’re documenting your network changes in Visio, or spreadsheets, or a tool like netTerrain, if you are manually updating your network diagrams, having change management policies in place is a necessity (and you can read more about that by clicking here).
Network work order management, such as the work orders that are included in our network documentation software netTerrain, helps you create and schedule tasks and keep track of changes made inside your data center rooms, telecom rooms, and office space. netTerrain’s work order management functions allow you to track any adds/moves/changes/deletions/installs to specific ports, equipment, racks, and really anything that needs to be tracked for changes. You can assign due dates, owners, and status values to the tasks you create, and, in netTerrain anyway, you can view your tasks and work orders, along with their properties, in a work order dashboard. From here, you can pass tasks down to other owners.
One of the most widely used features in netTerrain is our Circuit Layout Record: this shows you the physical path views to troubleshoot end-to-end connections faster. This can be used properly if the changes in your network are reflected in netTerrain via manual effort or completely automated with its SNMP network discovery. Another change management aspect is to help manage fiber and copper usage and other capacity planning measures. With accurate documentation, you can easily run aggregate reports on port availability which makes your job easier.
Example: Circuit Layout Record in netTerrain
Managing changes in the data center? Work orders help with :
- Improving the speed of changes
- Reduce the potential risk of changes
- View current current & future capacity demands
Get or send notifications when new tasks are either created or finished, report on tasks, and generate network work orders using criteria such as: past due, owners and custom inputs.
Need to connect to your existing service desk tool that your organization may already be using…like Remedy, ServiceNow, CA (now Broadcom), etc. In netTerrain, it’s easy: netTerrain comes with a robust Rest and SOAP APIs to not only pull information into these systems; you can also write back to your systems so that, in essence, you can use netTerrain web diagrams as the point of data entry to create work orders in your service desk tool. netTerrain can integrate with your existing ServiceNow application so that you can still use change management events in ServiceNow (instead of creating multiple tasks where people need to approve the changes). Link a network device to a ServiceNow ticket: network engineers can immediately see where network devices are located and help troubleshoot an issue faster.
Example: Integrate ServiceNow with netTerrain for Easy Work Orders
In conclusion, network work order management in IT documentation software like netTerrain helps make life easier. Create and schedule tasks in a couple of clicks and really keep track of the changes inside your infrastructure’s data center rooms, telecom rooms, office space, and more. If you’d like to give our IT documentation software netTerrain a try for free or find out more, just click here to get started.