OpManager

To read your WAN as a logical collection of devices and links is one thing. To see your WAN as a physical entity is quite another.

Your organization may use a network that spans across its offices in California, Detroit, Florida and New York, and a data center at Illinois, with links traversing in various fashions. As the network manager, it would be your task to make sure the network is always right on track.

Instead of looking at your networks as a combination of a myriad of routers, servers, switches and links, OpManager allows you to visualize your WAN. Now you just have to place your network onto its geographic location. You may even choose to receive regional alerts- splitting your WAN into North, South, East and West and then drill down to the issue depending on the regional priority.

Of course, the primary task of the network manager is to ensure that the network works! Always being in the 'know' and early response to communication failures is key to ensuring high availability across your WAN.

OpManager lets you proactively monitor and provide a high network availability environment with the aid of configurable thresholds and real time availability distribution charts. Setting, measuring and verifying service levels are greatly simplified with percentage availability and availability distribution dashboards. Additionally, OpManager uses CISCO's IP SLA technology to display top SLA violations and the least available links as well.

However, just knowing that the communication channel is broken is of minimal practical use without the knowledge of where the issue is. With OpManager you can drill down into the network path and identify the specific breakage in the link that caused a failure of the network.

In the world of networks, a high availability alone is far from sufficient. If the average round trip time between your branches across the coast is about 60ms but the RTT now exceeds 200ms, the poor performance is just as bad as that communication network being down or unavailable.

Now with CISCO's IP SLA technology, OpManager keeps you abreast with the performance across the various links in your network, giving you the capability to proactively manage and sustain your network well over the acceptable performance levels.

By graphically displaying the various communication paths and the RTT associated with each link, identifying the point of performance degradation becomes a breeze. Since the hops which cause the anomaly are brought to the fore, corrective action to restore the business can be initiated immediately.

Knowing whether the high consumption of bandwidth is generated by genuine traffic is an important consideration for capacity planning. Videos of no significance to the business might be streaming in, even as essential business services are clogged for bandwidth. On the contrary, there might be a genuine demand for greater bandwidth as well.

OpManager integrates with ManageEngine NetFlow analyzer, a traffic analysis product from ManageEngine, to provide bandwidth management and capacity planning capabilities. In addition to OpManager's monitoring functionalities, the NetFlow Analyzer integration brings in a high degree of visibility into the network's utilization and provides the data to deduce informed decisions.

With network frauds and threats on the increase, network managers cannot afford to have their communication channels to stand compromised. An in depth monitoring of the firewall and the information flowing across it would not only create a more secure network environment but also help find the usage pattern and identify genuine traffic from business irrelevant ones.

In conjuncture with ManageEngine Firewall Analyzer, OpManager gives insight into employee internet usage patterns such as the protocols used for communication and working vs non-working hours usage, enabling managers to plan capacity or incorporate appropriate usage policies in a timely and efficient manner.

Accidental or incorrect configuration of networked devices most often lead to the entire link being rendered unavailable. The impact associated is even more widespread if the device connects across multiple paths. While configuration changes in routers, switches, firewalls and others are few and far between after the initial set-up, it is always a wiser choice to back up configurations for quicker restoration when it must be reset.

OpManager integrates with ManageEngine DeviceExpert to offer network change and configuration management, enabling multi-vendor network device configuration, continuous monitoring of configuration changes, notifications on respective changes, detailed operation audit and trails, easy and safe recovery to trusted configurations, automation of configuration tasks and insightful reporting.

When it comes to managing servers, OpManager delivers exceptional performance with ease. By driving information about the availability, utilization, performance, server-temperature and packet loss, amongst others, OpManager ensures that you always stay in control of your servers.

OpManager equips you with a robust dashboard to continually monitor the CPU, Memory and Disk utilization in each of your servers. Moreover, you could set up your own custom SNMP traps and monitor an endless array of parameters. Further, with OpManager you can monitor your UPS and ensure that your data center is never in the dark!

A disruption in the email service could quite suspend business and cause havoc. With bi-directional mails running throughout the day, having a close watch on your exchange becomes essential. Using OpManager, you can monitor over 60 critical parameters out of the box, and pre-defined thresholds that you may later fine-tune as you find necessary.

Another important strangle hold, especially for small and medium business houses, is the MS SQL Servers. Banking on them for most of the database needs calls upon the necessity to closely monitor your MS SQL Servers round the clock. In addition to monitoring MS SQL Services, OpManager's MSSQL database monitor counters include Data Files size, Log files Used Percentage, Active Transactions, Log growths, Log shrinks, Log files free size, Log Cache hit ratio, etc. with an intuitive dashboard.

OpManager’s applications monitoring capabilities are truly never ending. You can now monitor any custom application that supports SNMP with OpManager, and even choose to be notified if the application violates a threshold you created.

OpManager monitors essential system level services for availability and response-time, thereby ensuring that your systems management plan is complete. OpManager’s service monitoring capabilities extend across DNS, Echo, FTP, Finger, HTTPS, IMAP, LDAP, NNTP, POP, SMTP, Telnet, Web, Weblogic etc.

OpManager also provides detailed graphs and reports about availability of the services that are being monitored. You can also choose to be notified if a service goes down. Further, the service monitoring is customizable and you can add any number of custom services to be monitored.

With even 24X7 monitoring of website becoming passé, robust and resilient URL monitoring is more of a necessity in todays world of hacks and threats.

OpManager manages URLs, Virtual Hosts and Intranet by ensuring that they are reachable and serving pages, instead of merely depending on ICMP pings or TCP port checks on port 80. Moreover, OpManager’s ‘Content Check’ allows checking pages against specific texts, thereby keeping hackers at bay. OpManager goes even further by allowing you to set request parameters such as login details and check if the page login was successful. This helps monitor web applications that require authentication.

Finally, A database failure on your public website could turn out to be quite embarrassing when users fill up a lot of details and click on submit - only to receive a database error or exception. With OpManager’s URL monitoring you have a simple solution. Just create a dynamic page which makes a database query and prints a success message. By having OpManager monitor this page and doing a content match for the success string, you can rest assured that your database is up and running along with your webpage.

Firewalls and virus scanners protect your network from external threats. But it is just as much your responsibility to protect them from internal threats as well. By monitoring the server event logs, and setting up a real time alerting mechanism, OpManager helps you prevent internal security breaches as well. With automatic as well as your own custom rules you can now monitor critical security logs such as failed logons, incorrect passwords and others across all your windows servers and workstations.

An interruption in the power system or even a flicker could cause expensive downtime. But UPSs, being electronic devices, are also susceptible to their share of issues. With OpManager, you are not only equipped proactively, but in most cases can even totally solve the issue before it occurs. Gaining real-time visibility into your UPS’s health by monitoring the charge, input line voltage, load and output current and voltage gives you the ability to act before any damage occurs. OpManager’s e-mail and SMS alerting when a fault occurs or a threshold is violated makes sure that you are always the first to know when there is an issue

Giving a service centric eye to your entire system means you can directly view information about your businesses. With availability reports, you can graphically analyze the percentage that the given service has been running without any hindrance, during the specified period.

You can now view real time availability of a particular service, and also pull out historical data for any specified period. While checking the availability distribution over the past 24 hours, you may notice that the mail service had been down from 10pm to 11pm. You can then drill down and find that the server had been down for that period. Upon investigation, you realize that the servers were being patched at that time. You then just have to add a note about this on the availability report for 10 to 11pm before sending it to your boss as e-mail.

No one knows the pain of a missed or exceeded service level, as much as an IT manager. It doesn’t even matter whether the customer is internal or external.

Being responsible for ensuring 99.99% availability for the VoIP and e-commerce services, you would wish to know the percent unavailability level so far. Both these services are business critical, and have an outage on the last day of the month. You need to prioritize between them. All you have to do now is look into their availability statistics and notice that the e-commerce service will exceed the negotiated SLA in two hours, while the VoIP service has five hours to spare. With this information, you can prioritize according to what needs immediate attention.

Orienting your IT to your business means you get complete real time analysis of your network’s impact on your business. Keeping your IT on track with your business is the best way to reap the complete benefits of your infrastructure systems and processes. With OpManager’s business level dashboards, you can see how and where your business is getting affected on a continuous real time basis.

Every time a device failed, you had just had to blindly fix it and just get it working. You had no data on its correlation with other devices and were forced to react mechanically. Now, you might notice that the devices on a particular service say e-commerce, go down more frequently. Consequently, you could see patterns and choose on a more appropriate course of action (such as increase the capacity for the devices on that service).