I have come to realise that I’ve tried to take part in too many communities, and it’s getting me down. Too many forums filled with too much noise, too many people not doing basic research. Too much time on my part to scroll through various RSS feeds & email lists. Time to re-evaluate what I’m doing, and why.
(Read more...)Recently I’ve been converting a network from an agent-based monitoring system to an agentless system. One challenge was handling custom application logfiles. Most agent-based monitoring systems make it very easy to add logfile encapsulators, to read a custom file, and react to specific patterns. But now I needed to convert the logfile into syslog, so it could be directed to my NMS, which would parse the syslogs, and raise alerts as required.
(Read more...)HP has been laying out their SDN vision over the last few months. They want to develop a complete SDN ecosystem, including an Open Standards-based network that can integrate with common overlay models, development resources to help 3rd parties to develop applications, test & validation tools, right through to an “App Store” that will deliver applications to end-users.
(Read more...)Network monitoring systems poll devices periodically, and then calculate average rates across the poll interval. Selecting the right polling interval is important - too frequently, and low-end devices can’t keep up. Too long an interval, and we might miss spikes, will lose detail, and will increase our time to detect & respond to incidents. We may choose to sample some specific values, or devices, more frequently - e.g. 1-minute status polling of our core devices, 5-minute polling for edge devices. But what about the collector - how does it decide when to run those polls?
(Read more...)Last year I posted about my frustrations with getting the DHCPv6 client working on a Juniper SRX-110. I am pleased to report that Juniper has now released 12.1X46-D10.2, which resolves at least some of my issues. I couldn’t find it documented in the Release Notes anywhere, but the parser now allows you to have client-ia-type ia-pd without also requiring client-ia-type ia-na
I’ve been thinking a lot about HP’s SDN App Store approach. In case you missed it, HP’s vision is to deliver an App Store for SDN applications, similar to Apple’s App Store. They want to have all SDN applications available in one place, with centralised purchasing and distribution. It will include both HP and 3rd Party-developed applications. HP says:
(Read more...)We needed a hosting provider that could deliver a platform to run a Virtual Appliance on. The issue was that we needed a reasonably high level of RAM, and we really wanted something based in New Zealand. Most IaaS providers are quite expensive if you want a high memory instance, and/or something that will run 24/7. We worked out that the most cost-effective option was to lease a server, install ESXi on it, then run our virtual appliance on that.
(Read more...)HP is discontinuing support for HP Route Analytics Management Software, aka RAMS. RAMS is an extremely powerful system for managing large networks, but it always struggled to fit in with the rest of the HP Software suite.
(Read more...)I’ve recently been asked about using IMC to backup newer Cisco devices, such as the 4500X, or 3850. HP has not yet validated the backup process for these devices, so it’s not officially supported by IMC. But you and I know that a backup for a new IOS-based device looks pretty much the same as an older one, so surely we can just tell IMC to re-use the same backup scripts it already has?
(Read more...)This article is Part 5 in a 7-Part Series.