[INUG-Users] Any good tool instead of reporter?

[douglasstvnsn at aol.com]

 I had a discussion about an old friend of mine last weekend.? We discussed a customer where we had mutual contacts. He told me that they were telling Vendors that they were going to a methodology where they manage their Network from Graphs alone.

My immediate thought was that I've seen this before! Yup! At AOL, alot of NOCs managed from a display full of User Graphs.

Here's my issues with this methodology. Sometimes an incident or problem is best reflected to a directed email address. Or relevant data concerning an issue may come about as the result of a human performing some action. Or as the result of a change.? Not all of these elements cause downtime or an outage in user service.

If all you're doing is waiting on users to get bumped, the ONLY thing you've done is with your management system is to replace the ACD and massive amounts of Customer Service reps who answer customer complaints, only a bit early.? They're  still going to call... If its important to them.? And yes, some will vote with their checkbooks.

Most performance management systems tend to be 5 minutes behind. In the Graphing world, you need this time to normalize data points, perform threshold assessment and verification, and store the data and metadata.? Inversely, most status pollers forward their information right away. Imagine waiting 5 minutes for a ping failure. What would that do to your Network Engineering staff? When status in real time (or near) does not equal status in the management system, you have a trust issue with the folks trying to use the system for valid outage recognition.

Fault and Performance live in two different time domains. If you attempt to merge the technology, you must merge from the Real time to the historical. To do so otherwise just doesn't make sense.

 ENMS systems need to be "evolved" into something beyond a bunch of operators waiting on the next event storm.? It becomes a middleware for information.? Fault, Capacity, Performance, Security, and Accounting. And when you merge in Business function, when things occur in the business realm that may affect something in the Infrastructure, why not put an Event into Netcool?? EASY to do. Routes information. 

So to my Buddy - Please send Clue Donors to our mutual friends...


 
Dougie!!!


 

-----Original Message-----
From: Blurry <obsfucate at gmail.com>
To: users at netcoolusers.org
Sent: Sat, 26 Jan 2008 9:41 am
Subject: Re: [INUG-Users] Any good tool instead of reporter?










Since my first job at DARPA in 1987 (we were doing VoIP in 1990), the
production of graphs for management and customers who can't interpret
them has been an ever present bane of my existence. What we need is
similar to the Visualizations (visual effects cast against your music
selection) function of windows Media Player. 'Yes I'd like to apply
the "Ambience Swirl" against this interface utilization data. Wow,
that is good !'

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