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While configuring DeviceExpert for usage in your network, you can perform certain administrative operations. The operations are classified under three categories
This section provides information on all the operations classified under the above categories.
The following eight operations have been classified as 'Device Management' Operations
Refer to the section 'Automation using Templates & Scripts'
Refer to the section 'Scheduling Tasks'
Refer to the section 'Configuration Change Management'
Refer to the section 'Sharing Common Credentials Across Devices'
Refer to the section 'Viewing Device Configuration Details'
The list of the configuration upload requests made by the Operators and the status of approval by 'Administrators' or 'Password Administrators' are shown here.
Go to "Admin" >> "Device Management" >> "Upload Requests"
In the UI that opens, the following details are displayed.
Pending Requests - Showing the list of
all requests that are pending approval
Approved Requests - Showing the list of all requests that were
approved by 'Administrators' or 'Password Administrators'
Rejected Requests - Showing the list of all requests that were
rejected by 'Administrators' or 'Password Administrators' along with
the reason for rejection
For any version of configuration, you can associate a label - that is, a unique tag. As configuration versions keep on changing, you will have difficulty in remembering the version number of a particular good configuration. To avoid that, you can associate the version with a label for easy identification. You can associate labels directly for the current configuration of any device. Labels can be associated with any other desired version also.
You can create any number of labels and use them whenever needed - that is, associate them with desired configuration versions.
To create labels,
Go to "Admin" >> "Device Management" >> "Label Management"
In the UI that opens, click "New Label". Provide a name for the label and in the textfield for "Description" provide details for future reference [to remember and identify the label] and click "Save"
The new label has been created; the name of the label will be listed in UI; it will be listed in all the drop-downs that are related to associating a label
The current startup and running configuration of any device or group of devices can be labeled with a unique tag. This labelling comes in handy when you want to revert to that particular configuration version. This tagging would also be useful for reverting to a previous good version in the event of a disaster.
To put a label to a current configuration of a device or a group of devices,
Go to "Inventory" and select the devices whose current configurations are to be labeled
Click the button "More Actions" >> "Label Current Configuration"
In the UI that opens, you can select a label from the available labels OR you can create a new label. In the text field for "Description" provide details for future reference [to remember and identify the label] and click "Update"
Note: You can label the current configurations of devices belonging to a device group from the "Inventory" >> "Device Group" >> <Name of the Device Group> >> "More Actions" >> "Label Current Configuration".
You can associate labels to any desired configuration version. To associate label for a specific version of a particular device, go to "Inventory" >> "All Devices" >> go to the "Device Details" page by clicking the name of the device. Click "Current Version" against Startup/Running as required and select the desired configuration version from the drop-down; click "Associate Label" and follow the steps detailed above.
Refer to the section 'Disaster Recovery'
The following operations have been classified as 'General Settings':
DeviceExpert uses TFTP server to transfer
the configuration files to-and-fro the devices. In case, DeviceExpert
is running in multi-homed machines, you can specify the interface to be
used for transferring the configuration files from/to the devices. The
interface specified here will be used for transferring (backup, upload)
configuration files of all devices in inventory.
To specify a particular interface,
Go to "Admin" >> "General Settings" >> "Server Settings" >> "TFTP Server"
Select the required IP from the drop-down. Click "Save"
To give effect to this change, you need to restart DeviceExpert server
DeviceExpert provides the option to use
SCP to transfer the configuration files to-and-fro the devices. In
case, DeviceExpert is running in multi-homed machines, you can specify
the interface to be used for transferring the configuration files
from/to the devices. The interface specified here will be used for
transferring (backup, upload) configuration files of all devices in
inventory.
To specify a particular interface,
Go to "Admin" >> "General Settings" >> "Server Settings" >> "SCP Server"
Select the required IP from the drop-down. Click "Save"
To give effect to this change, you need to restart DeviceExpert server
By default, DeviceExpert binds its syslog
listener to port 514. In case, your machine is multi-homed and if you
want to run some other application with a syslog server in the same
machine, you can bind the DeviceExpert syslog server to a specific
interface leaving the other interface(s) for use by other
application(s).
To specify a particular interface,
Go to "Admin" >> "General Settings" >> "Server Settings" >> "Syslog Server"
Select the required IP from the drop-down. Click "Save"
DeviceExpert executes configuration
operations such as backup, upload, scheduled task execution, report
generation etc as parallel jobs. The number of threads available for
such parallel tasks are limited. Depending on the hardware
configuration of the machine in which DeviceExpert is running, the
number of parallel jobs can be increased.
Hardware Configuration |
Number of Parallel Job Counts |
1.8 GHz PentiumĀ® processor and up to 1 GB RAM |
20 - 30 |
Dual Processor with more than 4 GB RAM |
30 - 100 |
To specify the number of parallel job counts,
Go to "Admin" >> "General Settings" >> "Server Settings" >> "Parallel Job Count"
Select the required number from the drop-down. Click "Save"
To give effect to this change, you need to restart DeviceExpert server
DeviceExpert
sends
various notifications to the users (for example, reports) using an SMTP
mail server running in your network. This section explains how to
specify the SMTP server details and entering email IDs.
To
specify SMTP
Server details,
Go to "Admin" >> "General Settings" >> "Mail Settings"
Enter SMTP server name in the text field, enter SMTP port and enter username and password, if your SMTP settings require authentication
In the text field for 'From' or 'Sender' address, specify the email id of the originator of the email; by default, the from address is specified as 'noreply@manageengine.com'.
Click "Save", if you have changed SMTP settings
By default, the SMTP server runs in the port 25. You can specify any other SMTP server also.
In your enterprise network setup, you might need to go through a proxy server to access the internet. In such a case, you need to configure the username and password for internet access. This section explains how to carry out proxy configuration.
To configure proxy settings,
The parameters to be configured are:
HTTP Proxy Host: Host name of the proxy server (eg: proxy-server)
HTTP Proxy Port: Port number at which the server is running (eg: 80)
Username to access the internet
After configuring the 'Proxy Settings', you can test if connection could be established with the proxy server. To test, just click the button "Test" of "Test Mail Server". DeviceExpert will attempt to establish connection with proxy server. If the configuration is proper and if DeviceExpert is able to establish a connection, you will see the message "Success".
Upon detecting changes in configuration, DeviceExpert provides the option to generate trouble tickets to your Help Desk. You can set your Help Desk Email id here.
SNMP v2 traps could be sent to a specific host upon detecting a configuration change. Settings could be done for that purpose here.
To send SNMP trap to the desired host (based on the change management condition specified through change management rule),
Go to "Admin" >> "General Settings" >> "SNMP Trap Settings" tab
Enter hostname or ip address of the recipient. Also, enter SNMP port and community. Default values 162 for port and public for community
Click "Save"
In typical production environments, DeviceExpert would deal with a huge amount of data related to device configuration. Audit logs on who performed what operation and when, also gets piled up in the database. Over a period of time, it becomes too huge a size. If you want to remove unwanted data, you can do periodic database cleanup.
You can perform two types of cleanup operations:
Important Note: While removing older versions, as per the number set by you, the following rule would be applied.
While removing the versions, BASELINE version and those versions above it will not be removed.For example, if you want to keep only the latest 10 configuration versions in the history and if there are say 15 versions at present, DeviceExpert will start removing the versions 1,2,3,4 & 5. While doing so, if, say version 3 has been labelled as BASELINE, DeviceExpert will immediately stop the deletion process. Versions 1 and 2 alone would be removed. All versions from 3 to 15 would be left undisturbed even though you have preferred to keep only 10 versions in the history.
Refer to the section on 'Disaster Recovery'
In the event of any issues, DeviceExpert server logs help us in getting to the root of the issue. Printing of log messages can be controlled through the two log levels. This section explains how to set the desired level.
Printing of log messages can be controlled through the two log levels - DEBUG and INFO.
DEBUG level prints all messages and it is useful for debugging purposes. The other level INFO prints some information messages. The default Log Level is 'INFO'.
To modify Log Levels,
Go to "General Settings" >> "General Settings" >> "Log Level"
In the UI that opens, select the desired log level from the drop-down and click "Save"
Refer to the section "Role-based user access control"
Go to "Admin" >> "Tools" >> "Database Console"
In the console, enter the query to be executed [only 'select' 'delete' and 'update' queries are supported]
Remember the following when executing a
query,
Table names and table columns are case-sensitive
For SELECT queries, set the row limit between 1 and 500. Default row limit is 10
Warning! You are directly accessing the database at your own risk. Any update or delete operations will result in loss of data.
When you require support for new device models in DeviceExpert, the sysObjectID of the new device is needed for supporting discovery of the device. To enable you to find the sysObjectID, DeviceExpert provides the tool sysObjectID Finder.
To find the sysObjectID,
Go to "Admin" >> "Tools" >> "SysObjectID Finder"
In the UI that opens, provide the Hostname/IP of the device whose sysObjectID has to be found
Enter the snmp Read Community credential for the device
Set a 'timeout' value and 'retry count' for the sysObjectID finding operation
Click 'Find'.
sysObjectID and sysDescr of the device are returned