NMSaaS Blog

When it comes to critical application monitoring, perhaps no applications are more important today than web based apps.

Virtually all major application vendors have now moved to a web-based model. The main reason is probably obvious; everyone has a device with a browser at almost every moment.

Beyond the standard desktop/laptop - smartphones and tablets are with us virtually 24x7 (not to mention newer devices like smart watches and other browser capable “wearable” devices). Due to this proliferation of devices, users are now more comfortable using a web-based application, with its familiar look and feel, than they are with individual “thick clients” which all have very different user experiences and workflow.

Determining the true “value” of a product or service can be a tricky undertaking. 

Depending on the side the transaction you are on (buyer vs seller) there may be wildly different opinions as to how value should be thought of. 

The seller of a product may be thinking about how much time and money was put into production of the “thing” being sold and therefore how much money they need to get out of any given sale to cover the costs plus leave a profit. 

In Part 1 of this series I discussed how an NCCM solution and a CMDB can work together to create a more effective IT inventory system.  In this post, I will be taking that a step further and show how your change configuration process will benefit from integration with that same CMDB.

In general, the process of implementing IT infrastructure change happens at 3 separate stages of an assets lifecycle. 

We’ve been doing a lot of blogging around here lately about NCCM and the importance of having an automated configuration and change management system.  We’ve even published a Best practices guide for NCCM.  One of the main points in any NCCM system is having consistent and accurate configuration backups of all of your “key” devices. 

Part I Discovery

“I am a rock, I am an Island…”  These lyrics by Simon and Garfunkel pretty appropriately summarize what most IT companies would like you to believe about their products.  They are islands that stand alone and don’t need any other products to be useful.  Well, despite what they want, the truth is closer to the lyrics by the Rolling Stones – “We all need someone we can lean on”. 

I’ve been working in the Network Management business for over 20 years, and in that time I have certainly seen my share of networks.  Big and small, centralized and distributed, brand name vendor devices in shiny datacenters, and no-name brands in basements and bunkers.  The one consistent surprise I continue to encounter is how many of these organization (even the shiny datacenter ones) lack a backup system for their network device configurations.

So far, we have explored what NCCM is, and taken a deep dive into device policy checking – in this post we are going to be exploring Real Time Configuration Change Detection (or just Change Detection as I will call it in this blog).  Change Detection is the process by which your NCCM system is notified - either directly by the device or from a 3^rd party system that a configuration change has been made on that device.  Why is this important?  Let’s identify 3 main reasons that Change Detection is a critical component of a well deployed NCCM solution.

In our last blog post “Why you need NCCM as part of your Network Management Platform” I introduced the many reasons that growing networks should investigate and implement an NCCM solution. One of the reasons is that an NCCM system can help with automation in a key area which is related to network security as well as compliance and availability – Policy Checking. 

In the landscape of Enterprise Network Management most products (and IT Professionals) tend to focus on “traditional” IT monitoring.  By that I mean the monitoring of devices, servers, and applications for performance issues and faults.  That makes sense because most networks evolve in a similar fashion. They are first built out to accommodate the needs of the business.  This primarily involves supporting access for people to applications they need to do their jobs.  Once the initial buildout is done (or at least slows down) then next phase is typically implementing a monitoring solution to notify the service desk when there are problems. This pattern of growth, implementation, and monitoring continues essentially forever until the business itself changes through an acquisition or (unfortunately) a shutdown.

There are many famous debates in history:  dog’s vs cats, vanilla vs chocolate &Coke vs Pepsi just to name a few.  In the IT world, one of the more common debates is “single platform vs point solution”. That is, when it comes to the best way to monitor and manage a network, is it better to have a single management platform that can do multiple things, or would it be better to have an array of tools that are each specialized for a job?