Monitoring InteropNet

May 22nd, 2009 by Julia Lim

We are so pleased to have been selected as the provider for Network Monitoring & Help Desk for InteropNet again this year. As Mike wrote about, with one year (and two shows) under our belts, we were able to stress less and enjoy the experience even more this time around. And winning Best of Interop for Network Management didn’t hurt any either.

So some details about what EM7 actually provided at the show:

Beyond standard monitoring for CPU, Memory, etc, and critical ping, we’ve worked with the other vendor providers to customize our EM7 appliances for some advanced monitoring including:
• Enterasys to measure total show bandwidth in and out along with other vital stats
• Xirrus to measure total wireless load, # of clients, and amount of bandwidth or errors above a critical percentage
• Mcafee to get vital stats on the firewall, from load to packets dropped versus reaching the network, plus custom events that were created to alert if any systems are compromised on the network
• APC to measure total power consumption for the show
• Avocent for their IP KVM gear to see what devices are connected to it (using which serial port) and to measure the speed of communications and the inbound/outbound traffic on a particular serial port to find things like “top talker”

And our customers reap the benefits of this customization work – done directly with the vendors to build in the best practices that are the only way something like InteropNet gets done in just a couple of weeks. Most of this work comes in the form of custom/updated EM7 Dynamic Applications that are the monitoring templates included in the product. So new ones, especially ones like these where we’ve worked directly with the vendor exports for the monitoring cookbooks, make it into customer systems.

We did something interesting on the help desk side of the product for InteropNet. Beyond the standard trouble ticket features with ticketing queues and notification, etc, the interesting thing about EM7 is that ticketing is integrated with fault and performance data and all of this information is viewed/classified into “organizations”. In this case, the organizations ended up being the vendor booths on the show floor – InteropNet’s “customers”. EM7 stored critical info like booth #, port #’s, even custom comments or details for each vendor, and this information was dynamically reset via a script that pulls any changes from the cloud-based Google Docs where the changes were originally made by one of the NOC staff. Based upon that, any tickets that were opened for a specific vendor/booth were automatically populated with the vendors’ latest and greatest info because we customized EM7 ticketing templates with custom fields to pull the info needed to resolve the ticket as quickly as possible.

On top of all that, when a critical event occurred in the NOC, EM7 sent a SNMP set command to a managed APC power strip which in turn was connected with a red strobe light in the NOC to let everyone know to swarm a problem.

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