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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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 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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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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IT Visualization Software: “what can it do?”
By Fred Koh - February 27, 2020In one of my previous articles — about what netTerrain is — I discussed some of the items you can visualize in netTerrain. When doing demos for prospects, most people don’t know the full capabilities of our IT visualization software, netTerrain. It’s more than just a network documentation, DCIM, and fiber plant solution…it’s a web-based…
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Need to Migrate Away from netViz?
By Fred Koh - February 21, 2020Back in the early 1990’s, a company based in Gaithersburg, Maryland, offered a desktop-based, IT documentation system called netViz. netViz did what it did great. It gave users the ability to document networks, data centers, and enterprise architecture diagrams. Users were using netViz to document its data center racks and cables, well before the term…
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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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