Network Management at the Network World IT Roadmap Show – Common Challenges and Advice from Hughes

December 16th, 2008 by Julia Lim

Greetings from the Network World IT Roadmap show in DC! (alright – I know it’s only about 20 minutes from my house, but with DC traffic that commute can sometimes triple) (img from belenjesuit.org)

This is our second year doing the Network World roadshow. We had a great time last year – meeting with several people that ended up part of the EM7 extended customer family and watching Legg Mason share their very interesting story of using EM7 to handle the network management challenges related to going from regional/national to global operations “overnight”.

After doing the booth thing – okay I confess we actually enjoy this part and particularly when customers stop by to say hello – we went to see Karl Fosburg, Director of Systems Integration (and of course EM7 customer) present in the Network Management, Automation & Control track.

Looking quite snazzy and successful (which I could show you if only “someone” had remembered to bring the Flip video camera…), Karl spun the story of how EM7 at Hughes came to be – from the problems they were trying to solve to the vendor selection process to the benefits of the final solution. And yet, this really is not just a plug for us. The challenges/problems are ones that many IT operations guys and gals share – not enough people or resources, too many alarms, not enough of the right alarms and then once you find the right solution, how to sell it to management.

I’m not going to go through the whole presentation here – as soon as I can find it on the IT Roadmap site, I’ll provide a link and you can check it out for yourself. But I will share some advice from a smart user who’s had to deal with a lot of different kind of network management problems and all those vendors trying to help him with those problems.

Some advice from Karl for network managers looking for a new solution:

• get executive buy-in by clearly identifying the deficiencies in your current network management systems
  • what really helped Karl was to quantify the SLA credits that could be reduced and the savings to the business
• look at reducing the number of tools you have
  • this has quantifiable benefits from reducing the costs of training, resources and recurring license fees to better integration
• support from additional functional areas can also help
  • the accounting department at Hughes was actually starting development of their own asset tracking system – which expense and effort they avoided because this is already included in EM7
• always perform an on-site proof of concept to verify that the vendor’s product works in YOUR environment
  • the vendors worth their salt will do this for you

And some general network management advice:

• have a well documented, structured naming convention for devices – critical as your business grows and grows fast
• no management system will help if it doesn’t know about your systems – so spend the effort up front to nail down discovery processes
• too many alarms has the same consequences as too few
• create a check and balances system to verify that systems are actually being monitored
  • Hughes makes sure monitored systems show up in their IP/DNS database, in EMC/SMARTS (their manager of managers), in EM7 of course in and various other element managers
• create a cross-functional “alarms” quality team that reviews network management implementation
  • this is a very interesting idea – a team over at Hughes that meets once a week and agrees on their network management “cookbook” for what alarms are important to the business, an iterative process it turns out
• and last but not least, provide regular updates and accomplishments to executive management

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