Change Management Series: Work Order Basics
By Jan Durnhofer - November 30, 2021Welcome back to the second blog in our change management series (a series designed to give you a basic understanding of how to use netTerrain for change management). In the previous blog in this series in our IT documentation software netTerrain, we discussed documentation management and, if you read that blog, you should now have…
Learn More
Change Management Series: Documentation Management
By Jan Durnhofer -Some time ago, my colleague Fred wrote a blog that offered an introduction to change management for our IT documentation software netTerrain. The main areas identified back then were: work orders, space reservation, the Collector status, and audit trails. The purpose of this blog series is to expand on some of these and to also…
Learn More
Complaint of the week: missing fiber strand counts!
By Jan Durnhofer -To put the cap on this year, we’re revving back up our “complaint of the week” series —as you may recall, this series is devoted to exposing holes in our product. While it may be a bit different for a software vendor to discuss real-life problems users encounter, we aim for a collaborative environment and…
Learn More
DCIM Software Racks: Changes and Capacity Planning
By Jan Durnhofer - August 31, 2021In the previous two blogs in this five-part series, we covered rack basics such as rack mounting, as well as visual overrides for racks. In this, the third blog in this series (and corresponding video, which begins at 9:55 and ends at 12:55), we’ll look at capacity management for racks in netTerrain DCIM software. When…
Learn More
DCIM Software Racks: Capacity Visual Overrides
By Jan Durnhofer - August 30, 2021In the first blog in this series, we discussed the basics of racks in netTerrain DCIM — and you also learned how to mount equipment to racks. What’s next in this, the second part of this five-part series? In this blog (and video, which begins at 6:57 and ends at 9:54), we’ll explore some of…
Learn More
DCIM Software Racks: Basics
By Jan Durnhofer - August 26, 2021In this blog series all about racks, we’ll dive into using racks in netTerrain and explore some of the capabilities in terms of: ease of rack mounting, modeling, the different kinds of racks or cabinets that you can create, and some of the capacity planning features. In this blog, the first in a five part…
Learn More
1000 DCIM Canned Reports is Not Enough: Design Your Own Dashboards
By Jan Durnhofer - July 7, 2021Having all of the data center and network documentation in place in a system is not always the end game: we also gain insight from the data, gain a better understanding of how the data’s aggregated and, perhaps, take action. Usually these insights come in the form of reports (which may look like, as shown…
Learn More
Want to Visualize Your AWS Infrastructure?
By Jason Sherman - February 23, 2021Use Amazon Web Services (AWS)? The AWS interface is great: you can service anywhere in the world and more. It’s not, however, without its limitations. What’s missing? What if you want to view relationships between things (such as backups, volumes, and snapshots) in a documented view of information and data? This helps you to better…
Learn More
Enhanced Layer 2 Network Discovery Coming Up!
By Jan Durnhofer - July 10, 2020A key aspect of mapping the network is the ability to automatically discover the entire topology! This is so crucial that, in fact, at least half of the requests we get from our customers involve what we call ‘Layer 2 Discovery’. It’s called Layer 2 (you can click here to read more about it on…
Learn More
What’s Your DCIM Roadmap?
By Jan Durnhofer - July 2, 2020Customers and prospects frequently ask us about our roadmap. While it’s a good question, it’s tricky to answer….not because I feel we have a ‘roadmap problem’ at Graphical Networks, but because, if I have to explain our stance and the reasoning behind it, it would lend itself to a long philosophical debate on the nature…
Learn More
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…
Learn More
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…
Learn More