Aid first-response engineers with guided troubleshooting
When an engineer first arrives on the scene to troubleshoot, there are a set of common questions they usually ask. NetBrain offers a set of tools to help answer these questions:
- What’s changed in the network?
- Is the network in a normal or abnormal state?
- What should I do next?
NetBrain Data View Templates put virtually any network data at your team’s finger tips. Clicking a Data View dynamically turns on and off layers of data on top of a Dynamic Map, making it easy to visualize the network from different perspectives. For example, if you’re troubleshooting BGP, turn on a BGP Data View to visualize relevant configuration, or neighbor statuses. If you’re diagnosing packet drops, visualize interface errors like input drops or CRC errors.
Data Views not only display raw data, but also flag abnormalities in that data, across thousands of parameters. For example, the Golden Baseline may indicate that a BGP router should normally have four active neighbors. If that router loses a neighbor, this would raise as an alert on the map which may be a clue to something wrong.
To guide engineers towards more advanced troubleshooting, and help minimize the need for escalation, you can also define Recommended Actions. For example, if an alert indicates a BGP neighbor dropped, the Recommended Action may be a BGP Troubleshooting Runbook.
Improve team collaboration during active troubleshooting
Troubleshooting is often a team event so there is a need to get everyone looking at the same thing, at the same time, to reduce redundancy.
Contained within a single NetBrain URL is a Dynamic Map of the area under investigation and all troubleshooting steps performed against it. This troubleshooting record is documented automatically. As teams troubleshoot collaboratively, they can share this URL. This ability to get teams on the same page, facilitates better handoffs and avoids duplication of work.
Automatically push changes and assess the impact
Quickly restoring business services is the primary goal of incident response. But deploying a fix introduces risk of collateral damage. Its critical to effectively resolve outages while also mitigating risk during problem remediation.
From design, to implementation, to verification, NetBrain’s Change Management automates the entire change management process. You can push complex changes to multiple devices simultaneously and even integrate with Ansible, if that’s your tool of choice.
NetBrain’s Application Assurance Engine helps to quickly assess and visualize the impact of a change on the network, and the applications running on it. If any problems are discovered within the change window, you can roll back to the previous state with one-click.