Circuits in Fiber Plant Documentation: OSP Circuit Layout Records
By Jan Durnhofer - October 1, 2018A circuit layout record (CLR) is an end-to-end view of a linear connection between two endpoints, on one page. We have seen these before, as when we launched a CLR for a cable or a port, netTerrain tries to follow the path as far out as possible until it encounters no more connections or too…
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Circuits in Fiber Plant Documentation: Terminating and Patching Up OSP Circuits
By Jan Durnhofer -In the previous blog, we started digging a bit deeper into the details of OSP circuits in netTerrain. This blog is also very technical: we will analyze how netTerrain terminates and patches up the circuits paths that we designed previously. Once you have your paths — with the correct hops, cables and strands — you…
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Circuits in Fiber Plant Documentation: Designing Optimum Circuit Paths
By Jan Durnhofer -When creating a new circuit in netTerrain, who decides which path it should take and how is that accomplished? There are basically three ways to define a path for a circuit — with decreasing levels of automation: (Most Automation) By having netTerrain choose the shortest path (Less Automation) By having netTerrain choose the shortest path…
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Circuits in Fiber Plant Documentation
By Jan Durnhofer - September 30, 2018In an OSP project, a circuit can be many things: a service between two points A and Z on a map, an MPLS connection going over fiber, or really — any logical relationship between points that uses physical resources of the network. One thing is quite consistent in fiber plant layouts, however: circuits traverse from…
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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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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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Maximize Fiber Networks with Outside Plant Software
By Jason Sherman - September 13, 2018IT infrastructure and networks today are growing at an incredibly fast pace. Daily modern life is only becoming more dependant upon technology, not less: as a result, the need for networks is skyrocketing. What does this mean on the network level — and for those in the trenches of fiber and telecom management every single…
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Stop Managing Your Outside Plant (OSP) In the Dark
By Jason Sherman - August 28, 2018Lately, I’ve been working on a great deal of OSP projects. While the scope between these different outside plant projects can vary a bit: some may be limited splicing and some may be heavy on the splices. One common thread, however, is how hard it is to track all of this information. While inside plant…
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Untangle Your Cable Management Mess
By Fred Koh - August 10, 2018Hey, I know what would be really fun to try at work today: let’s all spend hours trying to find a needle in a haystack! When you can’t see where your cabling is, and what exactly you have, you end up wasting countless hours trying to find cables you didn’t even know you have (or…
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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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