7 Ground Rules to Shorten or Avoid Network Outages & How-Tos

When your network is down, every second counts. Blackberry’s recent 3-day outage reminds us how devastating those moments can be. It has been reported that this outage alone has cost RIM over $50 million.

Now more than ever, enterprises need to be able to shorten or avoid costly network outages. In this webinar, a panel of network experts will reveal 7 proven rules to achieve just that. NetBrain’s unique map-driven automation software will be used throughout the webinar to show you how you can easily put these 7 rules into practice.

Rule 1: Baseline Your Network Religiously

When outages hit, the first thing everyone wants to know is “what’s changed?” The more details you can get, the better.

In this webinar, we will show how to use NetBrain to baseline your network to get the details you need, including routing, configuration, topology and traffic flow. More importantly, we’ll demonstrate how you can leverage that data during outage resolution.

Rule 2: Update Your Documentation Often

When troubleshooting, the last thing you want to spend time on is figuring out how the network was put together. Unfortunately, because of incomplete or inaccurate documentation, engineers often have to do just that during crunch time.

In this webinar, we will showcase NetBrain’s on-demand mapping capability for troubleshooters. Yes, you can instantly create diagrams in the middle of troubleshooting instantly.

Rule 3: Insist on True Network Visualization Capability

Countless network tools claim to give you visibility into your network. Are you really getting what they promised?

We’ll take a close look at three generations of network visibility solutions and analyze why users still demand a better tool.

Rule 4: Test Every Change Thoroughly - No Change is Too Small

75% of outages are caused by network changes. How can you strengthen this massive weakness in network management?

Automation. In this webinar, we will demonstrate NetBrain’s automated change verification capability and how it can prevent change-induced outages.

Rule 5: Look at Fault-tolerant Design Suspiciously

Network hardware and circuits all have issues sooner or later. Mission-critical networks are supposedly designed to withstand such faults. So why do we still hear about catastrophes from time to time?

In the webinar we’ll use NetBrain to look at a few network designs visually, and illustrate why the “Keep it simple, stupid” rule is important for fault-tolerant design.

Rule 6: Document Your Troubleshooting Process

When it comes to the way a network might fail, history does repeat itself. The challenge is having that history at your fingertips to guide future outage resolution.

In the webinar, we’ll showcase NetBrain’s automated documentation capability for troubleshooting. All the data surrounding a problem resolution can be collected and documented automatically.

Rule 7: Invest Time in Cross Training

To resolve an outage of similar complexity, why is there such a large time variation from person to person?

In this webinar, we will use NetBrain to showcase a visual way to carry out cross training among peers so that domain-specific network knowledge is better shared. The end result is improvement of troubleshooting efficiency for the entire team.

1.   7 Ground Rules to Shorten Network Outages.pdf
2.  View the Webinar Recording:

• PowerPoint Video (07:54)
• Rule 1: Baseline Your Network Religiously (11:35)
• Rule 2: Update Your Documentation Often (8:20)
• Rule 3: Insist on True Network Visualization Capability (05:51)
• Rule 4: Test Every Change Thoroughly (06:47)
• Rule 5: Look at Fault-tolerant Design Suspiciously (03:26)
• Rule 6: Document Your Troubleshooting Process (04:05)
• Rule 7: Invest Time in Cross Training (3:54)