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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Working with Cables & Strands in Outside Plant Software
By Jan Durnhofer - September 20, 2018Up until now, links in netTerrain have been quite simplistic in terms of how they are modeled: just choose a look and feel for the link, assign some properties and, if needed, apply some rules (visual overrides) to some of those properties. This works well for virtually all network mapping and most Data Center Infrastructure…
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DCIM PUE and alternative facts
By Jan Durnhofer - September 10, 2018Before we deconstruct the loaded title of this blog — ‘DCIM PUE and alternative facts’ — let’s first remove any mutual mystification around these two acronyms: PUE and DCIM. Or at least, let’s try… PUE stands for ‘Power Usage Effectiveness’. It measures the total amount of energy used by a data center to the total…
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How to Translate netTerrain to Klingon – DCIM, Outside Plant, Network Mapping
By Jan Durnhofer - July 20, 2018Every once in a while, we all need to translate something into Klingon. With netTerrain, you can do this. In this blog (and video – click here to watch it), you’ll learn how to localize strings in netTerrain: in other words, how you can translate netTerrain DCIM, Logical (networking mapping), and OSP (outside plant software)…
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Dashboards for DCIM, Outside Plant, and Network Mapping Software
By Jan Durnhofer - June 25, 2018netTerrain Dashboards (also called reports) are collections of gadgets showing aggregated data from the netTerrain database. These dashboards are accessed from the netTerrain project with a simple click (as we will see below). Whether it’s for DCIM, network mapping and documentation, or outside plant dashboards offer a very powerful visual way of aggregating and displaying…
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Manage Your Outside Plant with Dynamic Maps: Importing KML / KMZ maps
By Jan Durnhofer - June 8, 2018In this blog, the 5th installment to our series on managing your outside plant with dynamic maps, we’ll show how you can bring existing outside plant data into netTerrain. If you already have outside plant data in Google Earth (or another tool that supports exports to KML or KMZ formats), you can leverage this data…
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Automagic Calculations for DCIM, OSP, and Network Mapping
By Jan Durnhofer - June 7, 2018In this blog on automatic calculations (using our DCIM, outside plant, and network diagramming software), we’ll review what we call ‘expressions’ in netTerrain. Expressions are functions you can create in netTerrain using transact SQL to compute or aggregate any sort of scale or value — and retrieve it in a property. You may want to…
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Manage Your Outside Plant: Tracing Circuits
By Jan Durnhofer - June 4, 2018In this 4th segment (and video) of our series on managing your outside plant with dynamic maps, you will learn to trace a cable in our outside plant software netTerrain. In the previous segments in this OSP series, you learned how to: create a map in netTerrain OSP software, how to add objects to it…
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