image of a baseball at the plate, waiting for someone to step up

Step up to the plate and ditch the spreadsheets and Visio diagrams once and for all— no, I am not talking baseball here.

So, what do I mean by step up to the plate?

Ditching Visio Diagrams & Spreadsheets: Do You Have Pain?

When we have initial discovery calls with organizations looking at netTerrain, we typically will discuss the most common issues and pains they are experiencing that led them to contact us in the first place. Why, exactly, do they need automated network diagrams and documentation, anyways?

If you’re reading this blog, you may have similar issues and pains. Perhaps you can relate to one or some of the following pain points:

  • “Our network is growing and managing the network just too big of a task to continue to use manual methods.”
  • “I’m new to the job or I just took over the network and have no idea what’s on my network!”
  • “We’re spending too much time troubleshooting an issue.”
  • “I need a better way to control your inventory and reduce unnecessary spending.”
  • “I have an audit coming up and I need to show what’s on my network for compliance and avoid any penalty fees.”

Any of the above sound familiar?

Would eliminating those pains help give you more time for other work issues, or getting home early to let the dog out, making it to soccer games, or just having more free time on the weekends to do your own personal projects?

Whether you need to automate your network mapping/discovery, document your data center assets, power, and cabling infrastructure, to documenting your fiber or Outside Plant, netTerrain can help you solve your pains. So, how can you move away from manual work and efforts and start getting up-to-date network diagrams?

Automation is key to keeping your documents updated.

Ditching Visio Diagrams and Spreadsheets: Automation

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netTerrain’s Collector houses the network discovery (SNMP, NMAP, WMI), and connectors to many third party applications, such as: ServiceNow, Solarwinds Orion NPM, CA Spectrum, and cloud infrastructure (AWS, Azure), and VMWare. If you don’t see your application listed, you can use netTerrain’s Rest API’s and create your connection.

Ditching Visio Diagrams and Spreadsheets: Change Management

In addition to automation, having an effective change management process is crucial to keeping your documentation up-to-date. Without it, quite frankly, your documentation will be out-of-date (even if you already have automation in place)…and, it could even end up as shelfware. You need a system that equips your staff and contractors with an easy way to keep your network updated.

By having the right information readily available, and with netTerrain’s search capabilities and reports, you can quickly find the information you are looking for to help control your inventory, find your network issues or outages, and see an as-built representation of your network…

Ditching Visio Diagrams and Spreadsheets: Capacity Planning

Software such as netTerrain gives you a better way to plan for the future. In netTerrain OSP (outside plant), for example, you can reserve ports, find the available fiber paths between buildings — and in the data center diagrams, you can reserve rack space and ports. netTerrain has built-in data center capacity reports (you can review my blog on netTerrain’s many different types of reports here).

Ditching Visio Diagrams and Spreadsheets: Affordability

Not all IT visualization software has to cost an arm and a leg! I often hear from folks that are afraid that netTerrain may be too expensive or is just made for larger organizations. That’s not true: netTerrain’s pricing structure allows it to help any sized company. Whether you have a small network, or you are a consultant that needs to provide network documentation services to small businesses and from airports, hospitals, universities, and organizations, small and large, netTerrain can help.

netTerrain has flexible licenses with monthly, yearly, and perpetual license options and starts at a minimum license of up to 250 devices/objects for netTerrain Cloud and up to 500 devices/objects for an on-premise license.

You can start off with a smaller device count and upgrade at any time, as needed. With just applying a new license key, you can upgrade your license count at any time — to read more about netTerrain’s pricing, click here.

Bottom line? If you want to solve some real pains, if you’re ready to embrace automation and change management, if you could use capacity planning, and want an affordable option: step up to the plate and maximize your documentation efforts with netTerrain. Request a demo today!

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.