Networks change over time. As new services get rolled out they can often drive network-wide change requirements prior to turn up. Examples of this could be a minimum bandwidth speed for an interface group by a specific date or a modification to an MTU size on specific interfaces to support new traffic expectations.

Tracking the completion of such changes over time and monitoring their continual adherence is often a challenge for large scale multi-vendor networks which may have unique element management systems (EMS) or configuration management tools (CM). Too often, this still comes down to a shared spreadsheet tracker. (Checks calendar, verifies that it is indeed the year 2023 🤔) 

How can a network planner, designer or engineer track status of a large effort with many moving parts, schedules, maintenance windows and teams? Instead of relying on humans filling out a spreadsheet or disparate back end data sets from vendor specific tools to be synthesized...could there be a better way to gather and digest this information using a tool that has a "live" relationship with the device?

SevOne NPM as the source of truth

With the most basic SNMP polling, SevOne NPM gathers details about interface speed, link size, MTU and more and stores them over time. That information is continually refreshed every few minutes with the most current data from the device itself! Leveraging that data set you can create an alert policy (threshold) that will look for expected values and flag them when not met to continually assure the network. It can work for a quick check, an audit or to track progress of an existing change effort.

Example Scenario: MTU size must be 1514!

For this example let's pretend that the network planners have decreed that they need "all management interfaces to have an MTU setting of 1514." The MTU is the size of the largest protocol data unit (PDU) that can be communicated in a single network layer transaction.

Here are the steps we've taken in SevOne NPM to facilitate and automated reporting and audit capability with three simple steps:

1. Create an object group that bounds all the management interfaces in the network

   • This is accomplished by creating an object group using regular expression that creates a filter for just these interfaces.

   • SevOne NPM creates this group out of the box on day one; here's the logic behind it: Object Type = Interface and Object Name = `mgmt|Mgmteth' or `em[0-9]$`

2. Create an alert policy that evaluates this group every few minutes to ensure adherence to expected values.

   • In situation we set a threshold rule that stipulates if Indicator MTU Size does not equal 1500 then create an alert with Info severity.

   • You could get crazy here and have SevOne send a notification via Webhook to Slack, an event manager, your phone, email, etc. when it's violated.

3. Create a report that summarizes it all visually that can be shared or scheduled to email PDFs for a daily report!

   • A table of interfaces with their current MTU value; also using color ranging to reinforce the expected values, showing a list of active violators

   • An alert widget that displays those interfaces in violation and when SevOne last detected the violation

   • You can take this further by linking to summary reports or chaining to another widget to look at its value over time to detect when it was changed.

Report Dashboard

Conclusion

So with three easy steps we were able to create a simple, effective and accurate way to remove the manual labor of auditing the network, ensuring compliance or monitoring a network wide project all through a single report. Remove all the hours of manual work and ensure your network is operating as designed. 

*Extra Credit 

We leveled up the alert notifications from this MTU policy and configured SevOne to send them to our team's Slack channel where we can click right into SevOne to troubleshoot!

Check out our most recent release (SevOne NPM 6.5) that's available now and stay tuned for SevOne NPM 6.6 later this Summer!