abstract network connectionsThe digital transformation movement is leaving no prisoners behind in its wake: infrastructure-as-a-service (the Cloud) — for example — has become immensely popular as it frees up IT and development time and the costs to maintain a data center.

A 2016 IDG survey returned staggering results:

  • 47% of companies have transitioned their messages to the cloud.
  • 29% of companies currently use cloud storage.
  • 43% more plan to migrate part of their storage to the Cloud in the next several years.
  • Companies report they plan to spend (on average) $1.56 million on cloud services in the next year.

With so many organizations — of all sizes and across all industries — adopting and moving away from the traditional rack-and-stack model for adding, replacing, decommission network equipment, and using the Cloud (AWS, Azure for example), virtual machines, and switches (VMWare)…wouldn’t it be nice to see those infrastructure views alongside traditional rack diagrams ? When you can see and understand all of the system-wide relationships across the network, you can take action – from solving an outage to properly planning for capacity.

In a previous blog, we discussed how you can view your IT infrastructure with an IT documentation solution such as netTerrain. With netTerrain, you can also view your Cloud network: easily visualize your entire virtual and cloud infrastructure by creating application views. How? Via our Integration Toolkit (ITK). Using the ITK, it’s easy connect to these various sources via database connectors and/or APIs.

With netTerrain, it’s easy to visualize what’s in your virtual network:

  • Visually see your VM inventory to determine how many virtual machines you have, where they are, what they’re doing, and who owns them.
  • Visually see your AWS infrastructure and see how many EC2 instances, AMI’s, snapshots, and firewall rules.
  • Visually see Azure virtual machines, networking, and storage.

With netTerrain, it’s also easy to see what’s connected to what in your network:

  • Examine a global view of your corporate network and drill down in seconds through a region, a site, a building, a floor, a wiring closet, down to a single port.
  • Select two objects in distant diagrams and see, on the fly, how they are connected.

netTerrain’s purpose is to store and present information graphically and hierarchically: the connections between objects are tracked as carefully as the objects themselves. Because the entire project’s data is maintained in a central repository, it takes only seconds to go from the top of the hierarchy down to the smallest room, function, or port.

Bottomline? Computer networks, enterprise models, and assets don’t just exist on flat pages; neither should your documentation. An IT documentation and diagramming solution such as netTerrain gives you the ability to see and understand system-wide relationships — from the rack to the Cloud. When you can visualize everything from the port level to applications, you have the power to create significant savings in money, time, and headaches. If you need a centralized view of your IT infrastructure – both traditional network diagrams and your Cloud infrastructure, netTerrain can give you with one single pane of glass.

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.