Fault management

Networks are complex entities that are subject to frequent changes. The ever-evolving nature of networks can be attributed to the growing business requirements of organizations. Businesses often ramp up their networks with new devices, incorporate novel technologies, and expand their network infrastructure across geographies. These incessant changes in network architecture increase the probability of fault incidents.

Being an MSP offering network management services, it's imperative that you have a robust network fault management system in place. Without one, your customers networks are at risk of succumbing to glitches, and their businesses can even be brought to a standstill.

So it's crucial that you possess impeccable network fault management software that can enable you to proactively detect, isolate, notify about, and resolve network errors with utmost precision and speed.

Pitfalls encountered in the absence of a network fault management tool

The following are some of the prominent challenges you and your customers can face without network fault management MSP software:

• MSPs have to send technicians to identify network errors whenever they surface. Since MSPs operate remotely, this becomes an ordeal and increases the mean time to repair (MTTR).
• MSPs can't proactively detect faults in their clients' networks. This causes faults to blow out of proportion and results in unanticipated outages and network downtime, which translates into lost revenue, lower productivity, and disrupted service delivery.
• MSPs lack the legroom for automation. Without automation, MSPs have to spend considerable time and resources on first-level troubleshooting and maintenance tasks, which can otherwise be automated with a network fault management tool.
• MSPs would have a hard time detecting traffic congestion and bandwidth hogs, which could severely impact the performance of their clients' business-critical applications.
• Erroneous configuration changes can go unnoticed, making networks non-compliant to industry standards and vulnerable to security threats.

OpManager MSP Software: Foolproof network fault management software

OpManager MSP is robust network fault management software specifically designed to enable MSPs to offer state-of-the-art fault detection and troubleshooting services. Using OpManager MSP software, you can identify all events, isolate those events/faults adversely impacting customers' networks, generate and disseminate alerts via email/SMS notifications, and troubleshoot identified faults.

OpManager MSP's fault management capabilities include:

• Fault detection
• Fault isolation
• Alarms acknowledgement, suppression, and escalation
• Alarm notification profiles

Proactive fault detection

Using OpManager MSP, you can proactively detect all events that could impact the performance of your clients' networks. OpManager managed services software identifies events employing active and passive monitoring techniques. Active monitoring involves assigning multi-level thresholds to performance monitors and checking for violations of those thresholds. Passive monitoring involves analyzing syslogs, Windows event logs, and SNMP traps generated from faulty devices.

Fault isolation

OpManager MSP software helps isolate the critical events/faults out of all identified events, making things easier for your technicians. OpManager MSP employs techniques like deduplication and correlation to achieve this.

Using deduplication, OpManager MSP ignores redundant events and displays only unique events. With correlation, OpManager MSP factors out the events of all dependent devices connected to a parent device and only takes into consideration the events of parent devices. This requires you to preemptively configure device dependencies in OpManager MSP. The identified faults are then presented as color-coded alarms, wherein each color depicts the severity of the fault. You can also look at the history of each alarm for detailed analysis.

Alarm acknowledgement, suppression, and escalation

OpManager MSP enables you to acknowledge alarms so you don't end up checking on an alarm that has already been tended to. Also, you can suppress alarms for specified intervals. This comes in handy during scheduled maintenance, when you can disable monitoring for devices under maintenance. On top of this, OpManager MSP software lets you escalate alarms to specific emails/IDs when the alarms haven't been tended to in a specified amount of time or when they aren't in the scope of a technician's skill set and require a more specialized service.

Alarm notification profiles

Using OpManager managed services software, get instantly notified about your clients' network issues on the go. This lets you stay on top of your clients' network faults and initiate quick remedial actions. OpManager managed service software lets you send alerts via email, SMS, Slack notifications, sound alerts, SNMP traps, syslog messages, etc. You can also log trouble tickets on ServiceDesk Plus or ServiceNow when alerts are generated.