Understand both what your challenges are, as well as what the solution(s) you have licensed can do for you.
Welcome
So, if you're here you've either decided to look into obtaining a new network monitoring solution (NMS) or have already licensed Opmantek's solutions and you're looking for where to start. This is as good a place as any to begin.
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If you're still in the selection process make sure you discuss these requirements/concerns with your account executive or presales engineer.
Create Goals
A goal is nothing more than an aim, or desired result.
Now, take each of the top-3 requirements and create a list of goals for each. These might be 1:1, but will most likely be 1:many.
Goal Example 1
"Tool/vendor consolidation" might result in a list of tools that I want to retire/replace -
Tool/vendor consolidation:
- Replace current NMS, and proprietary monitoring tools
- Replace collection of point troubleshooting tools (separate ICMP/ping, SNMP collection, graphing, etc)
- Replace current CMDB (spreadsheet purchasing uses)
- Automate NOC runbook (currently a mixture of wiki, text documents, and notes each engineer maintains)
Goal Example 2
"Create a Single Pane of Glass" might result in a list of tools/views that your team needs dashboard access to -
Single Pane of Glass (SPoG); Provide central interfaces/dashboards with combined views into:
- Power Company Outage webpages
- Regional weather/radar maps
- Equipment Performance, including internet circuit graphs
- Current network events, priority, and ownership
- NetFlow/IP-Fix for core circuits alongside performance graphs
Build Use Cases
Next Up
Plan - Architect your solution, determine initial configuration/setup, create processes for deployment and rollback.