How One Texas City Turned Fiber Guesswork into Street-to-Strand Clarity
By Fred Koh - May 8, 2026It’s Tuesday afternoon and an email from the city manager lands in your inbox: “We’re finalizing the new fire station’s backbone connection. Can you send over the strand map and available fiber paths by Thursday?” You open the shared drive. There’s a Visio from 2018, a spreadsheet that hasn’t been touched since the last contractor…
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Your Campus Network Documentation Shouldn’t Depend on Someone’s Memory
By Fred Koh - May 6, 2026The call rarely comes with complete information. A classroom wing is down. A residence hall is dealing with spotty Wi-Fi again. The gym has an event tonight, and someone needs to figure out which closet, switch, fiber path, port, and IP range are involved before troubleshooting can even begin. So the search starts. One person…
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How to Choose the Right DCIM Vendor (Go Beyond Large Vendors & Feature Checklists)
By Fred Koh - May 5, 2026Unpopular opinion: a DCIM software search should not start out with a giant feature checklist. I have to be honest: almost anything can become a “feature” if you stick a label on something the software does. The problem is that a feature checklist tells you what the software can do inside a controlled demo, not whether it will actually hold up when things get real.
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netTerrain 10.1: Air-Blown Fiber, Expanded Access, Enhancements
By Jan Durnhofer - March 3, 2026The eagle lands again — this time bringing Air-Blown Fiber (ABF) modeling, dedicated workflows, and expanded visualization capabilities, along with support for Common Access Card (CAC) login and client certificate (SSL) authentication. Version 10.1 builds directly on 10.0 with focused enhancements across modeling, circuits, usability, IPAM, and authentication handling. Click here to check out the…
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DCIM vs. Spreadsheets vs. CMDBs: Which One Should You Choose in 2026?
By Fred Koh - January 7, 2026The tool you use to track your network and IT infrastructure can make all the difference between smooth changes and daily firefighting. Many of the folks I talk to end up in one of three camps: spreadsheets, a Configuration Management Database (CMDB), or Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software. Yes…they do overlap a bit…but they’re…
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Why Financial Institutions Can’t Afford Outdated Network and Data Center Management
By Fred Koh - December 18, 2025In financial services IT, small documentation gaps can slow incident response and increase operational risk. If you work in financial IT, you already know (all too well) how small gaps turn into big problems…fast: A missed dependency An undocumented port An outdated rack diagram Any one of these can mean longer outages, slower audits, and…
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How to Document Fiber Networks: Practical Guide for Cities, Campuses, & Utilities
By Fred Koh - December 11, 2025Fiber networks are critical to the foundation of communities today — in city backbones, across smart campuses, in utility grids, and powering public safety services. They’re growing fast…can your documentation keep up? If you’re like so many of the teams I speak with, you’re stuck dealing with “documentation” scattered in outdated spreadsheets, CAD files on…
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The Changing DCIM and OSP Landscape: Why a Niche Vendor Like netTerrain Makes Sense
By Fred Koh - December 1, 2025DCIM and OSP tools have changed in more recent years. Many of the well-known platforms reached end-of-life, merged into larger hardware ecosystems, or slowed down their development. More and more teams have started looking at DCIM alternatives, vendor-neutral options, and OSPInsight replacements because they need software that will stay consistent over time. When, to use…
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Transform Your Fiber Management: See netTerrain at Fiber Connect 2026
By Fred Koh - November 11, 2025Here at Graphical Networks, we talk to field engineers, planners and OSP managers every day — and one thing we hear loud and clear: your maps are outdated, you don’t know strand capacity until you’re in a manhole, and you’re juggling spreadsheets that should’ve been retired years ago. That’s why we’re thrilled to be at…
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DCIM & OSP Software That Actually Adapts: Why netTerrain Works
By Fred Koh - October 16, 2025You probably chose your DCIM software or OSP software expecting it to last — reliable, adaptable, something you could count on. But the landscape’s shifted. Big vendors are merging platforms, folding smaller tools into larger ecosystems, or moving away from software-only solutions. If your system comes from one of those vendors, it’s fair to ask:…
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netTerrain 10.0: New Power, New Look. 10.x Lands.
By Jan Durnhofer - October 7, 2025The eagle lands again — this time with flight logs. netTerrain 10.0 is here – the start of the 10.x series and one of our most powerful releases to date. This release introduces time-series performance for SNMP data, integrated discovery with distributed probes, a refreshed GUI, built-in IPAM, SSO/SAML 2.0, a new SMS/email notification engine,…
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Monitoring Data Center Cabinet Door Security Using Modbus and netTerrain
By Lucas Dürnhöfer - August 14, 2025Introduction In modern data centers, security requirements are increasingly stringent. Tracking and auditing the opening and closing of cabinet and rack doors is a common requirement, and multiple technologies exist to support this capability. The goal of this lab test was to create a practical use case for one such protocol—Modbus—and to demonstrate netTerrain’s ability…
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