Analyze this!

IT departments should be able to meticulously monitor their networks without incurring high operating expenses and absorbing precious staff time. This is the challenge that RGIS Inventory Specialists faced with its worldwide network of more than 400 offices-the IT department needed to find a way to analyze and manage this worldwide network.

RGIS provides inventory services in areas such as retail, warehousing, merchandising, distributing and pharmaceuticals. RGIS's business depends on the performance of its network; therefore, one of the company's priorities was to obtain an analysis tool that would allow the IT team to manage its current network, and handle expansion without much staff effort. The IT department also required a tool that could help minimize network downtime by being proactive with issues on the network.

An analysis tool was needed to monitor the network without adding additional staff to run it, and could be operated by everyone in the department, from junior staff to senior executives. RGIS researched network-analysis tools from a variety of leading vendors, and determined that NetMRI, from Netcordia, best met its needs.

First, RGIS installed a NetMRI evaluation unit in its headquarters to test for one month. Within 48 hours, NetMRI discovered issues on the network that had never been revealed before. Before the week ended, Jimmy Willard, project manager in research and engineering for RGIS, recommended that RGIS buy the unit.

"After only two days of analyzing our network, NetMRI found routing and VLAN issues I didn't even know existed," Willard says. "This tool has paid for itself several times over."

The tool evaluates the network as a whole system, including both physical and logical devices and links. Further, Willard says, it discovers issues in the network before they become problems.

Before NetMRI was installed, the biggest issue RGIS faced was verifying the correctness of every configuration file in its routers and switches against network configuration policies. This was a tedious task that required the network manager to search and correct each individual file. After NetMRI was implemented, this problem was quickly resolved.

The tool allows RGIS to automatically check the configuration files every day. It also auto-generates daily reports highlighting configuration issues, as well as any other issues in the network, and provides correctional guidance as well as compliance proof source. This provides the IT staff with a readily adaptable management tool that covers the entire worldwide network infrastructure.

"Since NetMRI has been running on the network, we don't replace devices nearly as often as we did before," offers Willard. "We can now easily differentiate between a hardware problem and a configuration problem, which is something we had issues with in the past."

NetMRI also enhances RGIS's network engineering effectiveness, Willard reports, as the information is now made available clearly and quickly. It allows the IT team to focus on the real issues affecting the infrastructure, instead of trying to troubleshoot dead-ends. This is accomplished by correlating the statistics and applying rules of logic for troubleshooting at the system-level functional areas, such as root bridge placement in VLANs, or security settings in wireless LANs. The tool complements RGIS's real-time systems with in-depth root-cause analysis presented daily in an understandable, browser-based view or report.

"NetMRI enables our entire network and IT staff to be proactive and run more efficiently," says Willard. "You don't have to be a rocket scientist, or have 25 years experience to use this tool."

RESOURCES

This article was provided by Netcordia, Annapolis, Md.

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