With all the existing network management products on the market, what was the motivation for creating NetMRI?
I found in my consulting work that people often had a lot of products, but that they didn’t regularly use them (yes, there are exceptions). The existing systems were difficult to use, weren’t up to date with what was on the network, were run by a different group, etc. The end result was that the network management systems weren’t readily accessible to the network engineers. Another factor is that the vendors teach classes that use the command line interface (CLI) of their products.
I’ve always felt that existing products were awkward and wanted to build something better that was useful to me as a network engineer. The goal was to automate many of the processes and network analysis that was handled via manual methods in other products. Unfortunately, there is seldom time for network engineers to pro-actively look for common network problems.
As a result, NetMRI is designed to be installed in less than an hour, discover what’s on the network, collect data from the network devices, and analyze the collected data the way network engineers do. Network engineers can then spend their valuable time determining the correct fix for the problems and how to apply the fixes to the network. In a sense, NetMRI is exactly what its name implies: an MRI of the network that provides network engineers with visibility into the network that’s analogous to the visibility that a medical MRI provides for doctors.
-Terry
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Re-posted with Permission
NetCraftsmen would like to acknowledge Infoblox for their permission to re-post this article which originally appeared in the Applied Infrastructure blog under http://www.infoblox.com/en/communities/blogs.html
