Tips for Pretty Network Diagrams: Fast Alignment and Arrangements
By Jan Durnhofer - October 1, 2018When it comes to doing less manual work, automation and discovery are great: just bring in devices, links, ports, and more into netTerrain and let the machine do the work. We’ve talked about this in great detail in previous blogs — and about how you can automatically position of the objects that you import automatically:…
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How the netTerrain Release Cycle Works
By Jan Durnhofer -In this blog, I want to talk about something that we’ve never discussed before but is of interest to our dear customers: netTerrain’s release life cycle…in other words, when do we release it, how often, how does it work, and how exactly do we decide what to put in a netTerrain version? As the release…
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Circuits in Fiber Plant Documentation: OSP Circuit Layout Records
By Jan Durnhofer -A circuit layout record (CLR) is an end-to-end view of a linear connection between two endpoints, on one page. We have seen these before, as when we launched a CLR for a cable or a port, netTerrain tries to follow the path as far out as possible until it encounters no more connections or too…
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Circuits in Fiber Plant Documentation: Terminating and Patching Up OSP Circuits
By Jan Durnhofer -In the previous blog, we started digging a bit deeper into the details of OSP circuits in netTerrain. This blog is also very technical: we will analyze how netTerrain terminates and patches up the circuits paths that we designed previously. Once you have your paths — with the correct hops, cables and strands — you…
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Circuits in Fiber Plant Documentation: Designing Optimum Circuit Paths
By Jan Durnhofer -When creating a new circuit in netTerrain, who decides which path it should take and how is that accomplished? There are basically three ways to define a path for a circuit — with decreasing levels of automation: (Most Automation) By having netTerrain choose the shortest path (Less Automation) By having netTerrain choose the shortest path…
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Circuits in Fiber Plant Documentation
By Jan Durnhofer - September 30, 2018In an OSP project, a circuit can be many things: a service between two points A and Z on a map, an MPLS connection going over fiber, or really — any logical relationship between points that uses physical resources of the network. One thing is quite consistent in fiber plant layouts, however: circuits traverse from…
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netTerrain 8.0: Usability, Discovery, API/Security, Outside Plant, & More
By Jan Durnhofer -If you are one of the many active customers wondering when the much anticipated version 7.2 of netTerrain will come out, the answer is… never. Worry not, though. After some deliberation, we felt that a minor release number didn’t do this justice. We have a ton of really big new features coming up, so…in the…
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Music to Listen to While Documenting Your Network (Jan’s Take)
By Jan Durnhofer - September 27, 2018I think my colleague Jason wrote something about this in his own blog….well, I am no less of a music freak. I am, after all, the proud owner of close to 15,000 vinyl records (you read that right, no extra zeros there). 10,000 of those are catalogued on Discogs, by the way (check it out)….
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Improve Network Documentation with Device Card Modeling – Part Two
By Jan Durnhofer - September 24, 2018Welcome back. In the previous blog, we drilled into some of the uses for device cards for your network documentation or Data Center Infrastructure initiatives. In this blog, we will go over the actual modeling process of cards in the catalog. We try to keep our blogs vendor-neutral — however, here we are talking about…
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Improve Network Documentation with Device Card Modeling – Part One
By Jan Durnhofer -Devices come in different shapes and sizes. When they are big, they can be ‘modular’ which means that they have so-called slots and cards. If you need to document your network with such devices, your IT documentation system should have the capability and granularity to model these slots and cards. In previous blogs, we’ve discussed…
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Enhanced Dual Rack Views for DCIM Software
By Jan Durnhofer -We have seen in previous blogs how you can model all kinds of racks in netTerrain, including racks showing front and back views. What’s new about this blog is that we’ll focus on these “dual view” racks (showing front and back), specifically racks where mounting devices on one side reserves (or blocks) usage on the…
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A Flexible DCIM Hardware Hierarchy Model
By Jan Durnhofer -In previous blogs about flexibility in a DCIM software, we discussed the importance of being able to decide how to organize your Data Center documentation project hierarchies. In this blog, we will focus mainly on the hardware piece of this. netTerrain DCIM provides a very flexible, n-layered, object-oriented hardware model, where the users have complete…
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