Webinar Registration: Manage Your Inside & Outside Plant
By Hannah Ash - June 25, 2018To accomodate a variety of different time zones and schedules, we are offering this webinar at three different times. Choose the time that works the best for you! Manage Your Inside & Outside Plant Webinar – First Session: Time Zone: 10 AM Sydney 6/29 5 PM Los Angeles 6/28 8 PM New York City 6/28…
Learn More
Dashboards for DCIM, Outside Plant, and Network Mapping Software
By Jan Durnhofer -netTerrain 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…
Learn More
What is DCIM? DCIM Software 101
By Fred Koh - June 15, 2018DCIM, which stands for Data Center Infrastructure Management, gives data center managers a central repository from which they can manage their data centers’ assets, space, power, cabling, cooling, and downtime. DCIM makes managing the ever-expanding ecosystems in data centers less daunting: with DCIM software, cable and circuit outages can be traced and resolved, new equipment…
Learn More
How To: Network Diagrams with Visio & Spreadsheets
By Jason Sherman - June 12, 2018If you’re a network engineer trying to manage the network — without automated network diagramming software — let me tip my hat to you: you’re probably better qualified than I am to write the introduction to this blog. Network engineers everywhere know, all too well, the pain of troubleshooting, fixing network outages and issues when…
Learn More
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…
Learn More
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…
Learn More
The Totally Biased Guide to Documenting Your Network: What Can Be Documented?
By Jason Sherman - June 5, 2018Now that you’ve identified what it is that you actually need to document, let’s dive into the details….aka what does that look like in your brain? Imagine you have a crystal ball and look into the future: what does your documentation look like. By ‘future’ I mean that you should set a realistic timeline —…
Learn More
Manage Your Outside Plant: Tracing Circuits
By Jan Durnhofer - June 4, 2018In this 4th segment (and video) of our series on managing your outside plant with dynamic maps, you will learn to trace a cable in our outside plant software netTerrain. In the previous segments in this OSP series, you learned how to: create a map in netTerrain OSP software, how to add objects to it…
Learn More
Why Big DCIM Vendors Have a Big ROI Problem
By Fred Koh - May 31, 2018Regardless of how much large software vendors may want it to be otherwise, DCIM, aka data center infrastructure management software, isn’t — by its very nature — a one-size-fits-all solution. It can function across a number of different data center functions. Don’t just take my word for it: ask ten DCIM vendors to define exactly…
Learn More
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…
Learn More
Manage Your Outside Plant: Mapping Fiber Strands in a Splice Box
By Jan Durnhofer - May 29, 2018In this article and video, the third segment in our series on managing your outside plant with dynamic maps, you will learn how to apply netTerrain OSP to a very common scenario in GPON network mapping and fiber documentation: creating fiber strands and mapping them to a duct (you can click here to watch the…
Learn More
How to Keep Your Network Diagram Project Right-Sized
By Jason Sherman - May 17, 2018When it comes to mapping and diagramming the network, is there such a thing as inviting ‘too many people to the party’? Of course, it’s always more fun to invite others to your (network documentation) party…and, of course, sometimes you have to. Sometimes, however, it is more effective to start small and do just what…
Learn More