netTerrain Complaint of the Week: where’s your feature request system?
By Jan Durnhofer - June 30, 2020A customer who uses netTerrain for Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) recently asked us why they couldn’t access some sort of customer-centric feature request database or roadmap tool. It’s a good question (and it’s one that also invites some interesting philosophical debates that are fodder for more than the one heated discussion our team had…
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netTerrain Complaint of the Week: the upgrade patch won’t work!
By Jan Durnhofer - March 27, 2020As you may have seen from one of our newsletters or announcements, we just released version 8.5 of netTerrain . Since most of our customers have an on-premise installation, they’re pointed to download the new version of the software (I’m referring to customers that already use netTerrain and therefore have plenty of data related to…
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netTerrain 8.5: Fresh Look, New Features
By Jan Durnhofer - March 23, 2020This is the fourth, and perhaps the last, incarnation of the 8.x series. This time around, our engineering team worked on close to 300 tickets. Yes, 300! There were the usual small fixes and improvements, and also many tickets related to the Collector and the API, but, drum roll please: 8.5 also saw some major…
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netTerrain Settings: Fiber and Outside Plant Diagram Tuning
By Jan Durnhofer - March 17, 2020In our first blog in this series on settings for our outside plant software, we explained the need for settings in the context of fine tuning you Data Center, Network Documentation or Outside Plant project and we looked into a specific repository of parameters called Settings.xml. In our second blog in this series we looked…
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Press Button, Picture Network, Go to Sleep…?
By Jan Durnhofer - March 13, 2020If you work in IT, and you’ve spent more than 5 minutes trying to troubleshoot the network, you probably know the usual deal with network documentation . It’s very important and at the same time… it’s usually the last thing people update. In ‘Steady State’ mode, aka when no alarms are going off, you run…
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netTerrain Settings: Fine-tune netTerrain Notifications & Visualization Features
By Jan Durnhofer - March 5, 2020In the first blog in this series, we explained the need for settings in the context of fine tuning you Data Center, Network Documentation or Outside Plant project and we looked into a specific repository of parameters called Settings.xml. In this second blog, we will continue looking into specific settings that can help you fine…
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Where’s the Deployment Guide?
By Jan Durnhofer - March 3, 2020This week we opened a very interesting email from a potential customer who wanted to check out netTerrain’s deployment guide (they’re seriously considering deploying netTerrain DCIM for their Data Center Infrastructure Management needs). After providing this prospect with the installation guide, he came back requesting more documentation that would specifically address firewall rules. I thought…
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netTerrain Settings: Secrets for Fine-tuning Your DCIM, OSP, and Network Diagrams
By Jan Durnhofer - February 20, 2020One of our mantras as a software company is to try to deliver a product that you can “manage by exception”. This means that, ideally, the software should already be configured in such a way that it accommodates your most likely needs. Only in case of an exception, in which some setting needs to be…
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netTerrain Complaint of the Week: the previewer isn’t smooth enough!
By Jan Durnhofer - February 19, 2020Welcome back to our complaint-of-the-week series. After a rather long hiatus, we’re back again with this series dedicated to unearthing some of the weaknesses you may come across while using netTerrain. Exposing weaknesses…from a software vendor? Yep: as good software is an iterative process of improvement, we have no problem exposing some of the things…
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Zoom & Pan: a Gazillion Ways to Do It, but Stick to the Shortcuts!
By Jan Durnhofer - February 15, 2020As you may know, we usually poke fun at ourselves by writing about complaints customers have in our complaint of the week series that focuses on what our users don’t love about our software for network mapping, data center management, and outside plant. Today, however, I’m turning the tables a bit: I’m putting you, our…
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Server Sizing for DCIM and OSP Deployments
By Jan Durnhofer - February 4, 2020Unless a customer purchases a cloud subscription of netTerrain (in which case we provide the server), we usually get a request for help with server sizing during the deployment phase of a DCIM or OSP implementation. This is expected, as the gatekeepers of the IT world have to install the software and they need to…
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Graphical Networks 2019: Year in Review
By Jan Durnhofer - January 31, 2020The holidays are over and now is the time of the new year when I usually get ready to beat my chest a little bit bragging about the previous year’s results. This year is no different: 2019 was very kind to us (in virtually every aspect and statistic). 2019 at a glance: ● …
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