Convince Your Boss You Need Network Diagrams with 5 Statistics
By Fred Koh - August 12, 2021Do you manage the network? Is relying on Visio and spreadsheets driving you crazy? Know you need network diagrams but you’ve got to make a strong case to the bosses upstairs? If just promising them that you’ll get more done, reduce downtime, meet Service Level Agreement (SLAs), lessen the burden of overtime, and keep crucial…
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Why Don’t You Publish Your Software Pricing?
By Fred Koh - July 26, 2021When exploring purchasing software, whether it’s looking for a network diagram tool, a Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software, or Outside Plant (OSP) software, one of the first things that crosses people’s mind is…how much does your software cost? We don’t publish our prices online because the cost is based on two things: what do…
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Got Fiber Plant Diagrams?
By Fred Koh - July 20, 2021During the intervening years since we first launched netTerrain Outside Plant (OSP) — it’s an add on module to netTerrain Logical or netTerrain DCIM — we’ve fielded many questions about the type of GIS-enabled maps that netTerrain supports as well as netTerrain’s ability to import existing maps/diagrams. What’s netTerrain OSP (Outside Plant Software)? First, what’s…
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Beavers vs. Your Outside Plant
By Fred Koh - July 16, 2021When we first saw this news story back in April of this year, we said, “we have to write a blog about this.” What’s it about? Well, you probably “wood”n’t believe it, but: beavers caused some massive headaches in a Canadian town. Yes: beavers. If you’re new to working on the outside plant, that may…
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Need to Replace Your DCIM Software?
By Fred Koh - July 14, 2021Using a Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) solution? Whether it’s something free (like OpenDCIM) or something you paid for, there may come a time when you decide you need something that your current DCIM solution doesn’t offer, or if your DCIM vendor has moved on to focus on other products and is not supporting its…
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Outdated Hardware/Software Headaches? Network Diagrams/DCIM Can Help
By Fred Koh - July 9, 2021In 2016, Dimension Data released their then-annual Network Barometer Report which showed that 42% of network devices were either outdated or aging. While this statistic is a few years old, I doubt the numbers have radically changed since then. It’s all too easy for software and hardware to become outdated…but the price you pay for…
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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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Secure your DCIM and Network Documentation with Granular Permissions
By Jan Durnhofer - June 28, 2021Security is top of mind within IT departments…especially lately. We’ve seen many headlines about breaches happening across corporate America and we just heard about the Solarwinds breach — one of the most sophisticated hacks in the history of IT hacks. Despite IT security making the headlines again and again, one often overlooked aspect of security…
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If Your DCIM Needs a User Guide, it’s Flawed
By Jan Durnhofer -Some folks say, “if a software needs a user guide, it’s already flawed.” While this statement may be extreme, there is a point here. At Graphical Networks, we strive to make software that’s as easy-to-use as possible (so it doesn’t become an obstacle between the user and the task at hand). In this blog and…
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DCIM’s Impact on Data Center Efficiency: 2010 vs. 2021
By Fred Koh -Lately, we’ve written a few blogs about how data center infrastructure management (DCIM) software helps data centers achieve greater efficiency which made me think, it would be interesting to look at where we started over a decade ago and where we are today. Did you work in data centers ten years ago? What changes have…
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Limited Custom Fields in DCIM Software? Run for the Hills!
By Jan Durnhofer -We’ve said it in the past, we’ll say it now, and we’ll say it again in the future: good DCIM software needs to be flexible. In this blog (and video), we’ll check out some use cases that show why it’s important to have flexibility in creating custom fields as well as how they work in…
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Network Documentation: Do You Really Need the Bells & Whistles?
By Fred Koh - June 24, 2021One of my employees recently forwarded me a Reddit comment thread about network documentation. The original poster asked: what’s good for documentation software? A Redditor name-dropped a big name company in network documentation software and said “don’t buy it.” They went on to describe having been promised many great things to come out of the…
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