On-premises system overview

Network management

Network Manager displays availability, performance, event, and configuration data for network views. Netcool Configuration Manager provides configuration and compliance management capabilities for network devices, and reports devices that violate user-defined rules. Topology Search is an extension of the Networks for Operations Insight feature. It provides insight into network performance by analyzing events that have been enriched with network data and determining the lowest cost routes between two endpoints on the network over time.

Users can run a discovery to find all the devices and interfaces on their network, determine their connectivity and build a topological representation. Polling can be configured to monitor any scope of the discovered topology, and to generate events if configured thresholds on certain values are violated, or the polled device or interface is unresponsive.

The discovered topology can be visualized, with its alert status, in standard network views, and in a hop view of a chosen device with a number of its connections, which you can configure. The Network Health Dashboard can be used to display availability, performance, event, and configuration data for monitored devices and interfaces in user selected network views. Devices can be examined in more detail with the Structure Browser, MIB Browser, and MIB Grapher, and reports can be run to retrieve data about the network and its performance.

Events are received from OMNIBus probes and from polls. The Active Event List can be used to view and filter these events, and launch to any associated topology. If events occur on topologically linked devices, then Network Manager identifies the root cause event, and highlights it in the network and event visualizations.

Service and topology management

Topology and service management enable the real-time and historical visualization of highly dynamic and distributed infrastructure and services.

Many different observer integrations are available to obtain topology and state information from disparate sources. These observers are easily configured and run from a configuration UI, or through APIs. The information that is collected by the observers is used to build a topological representation, which can be viewed in the Topology Viewer.

You can query the built topology, and display a topological view of a chosen resource, its relationships, which can be configured in a number of hops, its properties, and its state. Users can view a topology dynamically so that incoming changes to the topology are shown, or they can pause the topology and view incoming changes to the displayed topology on-demand. The history timeline can be used to view any resource in the topology and the changes that occurred to its relationships, properties, and state in a defined time window.

Event analytics

Event Analytics analyzes historic and live event data to identify seasonality, related events, and patterns. From this analysis, operators can build and deploy rules that can enrich, suppress, and group events. The root cause (parent) event can be chosen when the rule is created. The deployed rules correlate and group events, and reduce the number of events that are presented to the operator in the Event Viewer.

Events are grouped by the following rules:

• Seasonality - events that occur at a particular time.
• Related events - events that usually occur within a short time of each other.
• Temporal patterns - events that match a temporal pattern. Temporal patterns are patterns of behavior that occur in temporal groups, which are similar, but occur on different resources. Patterns can optionally be configured to use non-exact matching where there is name similarity or a regular expression match.
• Scope-based correlation - events that are grouped together by a user-defined event policy, which groups events that have a common attribute, such as a resource.

Configuration scans to generate analytics based on your event data can be scheduled, or can be run on demand. You can view data on seasonal events in graphs and charts.

Search (Log Analysis)

The search and analysis capabilities of Operations Analytics - Log Analysis can be run against selected events, for example to search for similar events, events from the same node, or events with a matching keyword.