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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.

If you have not yet selected an NMS solution, please see our online guide: How To Select a Network Monitoring Solution

Why are you looking for a new NMS?

Start by asking yourself why you, or your organization, if looking for a new NMS. The more honest and detailed you are in your answer the more satisfying the outcome.

Here are some answers we often hear -

  1. Tool/vendor consolidation
  2. Improved product support and/or vendor response
  3. Access to updates more often
  4. Support for a wider range of equipment/technologies
  5. Reduced cost, or cost control as you scale your business
  6. Single pane of glass (SPOG)
  7. Integration with 3rd party components

Now, why is answering this question important? Because the answers you give here help drive where you place your emphasis during the first round of implementation. Yes, I said the first round of implementation. Implementing a new NMS, even one for a relatively small network, is not a "one and done" thing. Your NMS is a living, breathing solution that grows and improves with time and usage. As a result, you'll need to adjust how it works, and how your team uses it, in order to get the most from it.

You'll learn more about what we refer to as "Crawl->Walk→Run" in the Planning section of this guide.

Prioritize

Take the list you just made and prioritize it; top to bottom, everything in order and in its own place. Now, take everything below the top three items and sweep them into a drawer. We'll come back to them in a minute, but for now, set them aside. You don't even want them where you can see them.

Whatever these are, these three answers to "why are you looking for a new NMS?" are your immediate focus.

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

Great, now you should have a list of priorities and goals for each. From here you can break down each goal into a list of use cases - specific examples of what administrators, users, or situations/events that support that goal, and how they can/should be handled.

Please note that in these examples we are using light-weight use case format. uses cases can take many levels of detail, from simple (as provided here) to very detailed.

Use Case Example 1

For "Replace current NMS, and proprietary monitoring tools" you might create a list of the equipment you have, which technologies/methods are available to monitor those devices, along with any other requirements. These are expressed in examples, or Use Cases

Replace current NMS, and proprietary monitoring tools


Use Case Example 2




Next Up

Plan - Architect your solution, determine initial configuration/setup, create processes for deployment and rollback.

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