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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The netTerrain Product Selection Pocket Guide
By Fred Koh - August 31, 2018Need to document the network — and your outside plant, as well? Or maybe you need to manage rack capacity and weight? Not sure which netTerrain product you need? Let’s figure it out! netTerrain is designed to be user-friendly, and it shouldn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out which product you need: this quick…
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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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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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How to Reserve Resources in DCIM, Network Documentation, & OSP
By Jan Durnhofer - May 30, 2018In this blog, and accompanying video, you’ll learn how to reserve resources in netTerrain. Time and time again, we’ve seen countless situations in which our customers need to reserve a resource in netTerrain without making it active — while still being able to see the resource reserve reflected in the diagrams. Maybe a user wants…
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Buying DCIM? Don’t Overlook Customer Service
By Jason Sherman - April 4, 2018In general, the importance of good customer service can’t be overstated: with DCIM, it’s crucial to a successful implementation. Unfortunately, with DCIM — it can prove hard to find. I manage customer support for our documentation suite: DCIM, network mapping, and outside plant. I think one reason we have had success is being able to…
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How Does Automatic Network Mapping Work?
By Jason Sherman - February 8, 2018SNMP is an old time workhorse of information. If you’ve been a network engineer for a while, the ability to automatically discover objects when you’re documenting the network can’t be overhyped. Automatic network mapping, on this level, significantly reduces your manual workload and ensures that your documentation is accurate and up-to-date. If you’re looking at…
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