NetCrunch 9.3 Network Monitoring System Live Demo

my name is Michael from a drum software and today I'm going to be showing you the newest release of neck crunch version 9.3 neck crunch is an all-in-one an agentless network server application file log and web monitoring suite and everything is built into one package we were on a Windows Server 2008 r2 or better that's the server and we also have desktop web and mobile consoles what I'm showing you today is the desktop console running on Windows 10 we are Cisco VMware and Microsoft partners and we are also the only mainstream modern rendering solution that is certified Cisco compatible as well setup takes only a few minutes and we do support hundreds of devices and applications out of the box when you first get in that crunch installed what it's actually going to do it's going to scan your network and identify your devices and then apply what we call device types to them so everything that the Cisco switch is going to be identified as just a switch Windows Server and so on and so forth once we actually do identify what your devices are we apply what we call monitoring X to them and these are just policy based sets of rules and alerts based on your device types so I'll show you here the Windows Server for example this is our default Windows server monitoring pack and we have these various thresholds set as per microsoft's recommendations and all the devices that we do identify as a Windows server are going to have this monitoring pack applied to them of course later you can go in here and you can adjust the thresholds however you want to maybe static thresholds aren't important to you we do offer a baseline threshold infuse Oh instead of letting you know that just free space is less than 10 percent we can let you know that disk free space is 20 percent lower than the average of last two weeks or something like that if you do make changes to the monitoring pack here it will be applied to all of the devices that share this monitoring pack so in this case we are looking at a hundred and 40 for Windows Server machines that we have so if I adjust anything there it would be applied to all the other Windows servers as well of course you can make custom monitoring packs based on any kind of criterias you can individually or by group make changes as well but this gives you a powerful way to make large changes at quickly and efficiently once we do identify that something has happened or you want to be alerted that when our alert escalation scripts come in so out-of-the-box we have a default notification script and what this default notification script is simply going to show you a window that shows up and pops up here at the bottom right the purpose of having this out-of-the-box is so you don't get flooded with emails or alerts or whatever it might be but of course later you're going to create your own monitoring script based on the various conditions and the various severity zuv your alerts and how you want to be alerted about them we can have something run immediately or we can have something run after certain conditions are met so for example let me know if something is still happening after five minutes or let me know if two things happen at the same time for the purposes of this I'll just show you the different kinds of things that we can do so of course there's some basic stuff play a desktop notification window that's going to be at the bottom right here play a sound notify user or group so if you do have a larger network or you have multiple administrators in charge you can notify them when problems happen in their part of the network that they're responsible for but not notify the other ones who have different responsibilities we can of course send you an email and these emails are customizable you can send links you can send any kind of information that you want there and we can also send you SMS 'iz by a GSM modem so this is useful for example if your internet goes down or your power supply goes down and your honor you're on backup power supply notify you via the SMS is plugged in gsm modem the more important stuff and the more really useful stuff here are control functions so when something does happen we can run a program we can run a script we can restart a service we can reboot a machine and there's actually two examples that I like to give here so for one of our clients we are monitoring his servers and when diskspace falls below 10% we actually run a script to delete the temp files five minutes later if running the script and doing the temp files has brought this space over 10% then he's not going to be notified of course it's being written to login all of this but you're simply not wasting his time by sending an email or SMS another example we could do let's say you're running a CRM service on one of your machines if that service goes down we can restart it after five minutes five minutes later if the service is still down we can reboot that machine and five minutes later if that hasn't solved the problem then we can notify the administrator who's in charge and on top of that one or later if it's still down then we can actually notify his superior or escalate it even higher now I'm going to be showing you our main window here and this is the main Atlas dashboard and the purpose of the Atlas dashboard is to give you a live look at the health and status of your network as it exists this view and all of the views that we're going to be showing a neck crunch are dynamic and they're being updated in real-time so whatever it is that you are looking at is going to be a live look at the health of your network as it exists this is adjustable however you want to for your own screen resolutions and I'll talk about everything you see here is going to be clickable so you can go and find more information about whatever it is and you can see here at the bottom right we do have a desktop notification window that just popped up in that crunch we use color coded system to let you know the status of your devices red is going to mean that is down this means we have no connection with it but so ever warning means we do have a connection with it but there's some kind of alert onboard so maybe this space is low processor utilization is too high someone and so forth green of course is everything is OK this is the way we want it and we do have a feature adding an inactive state as well so these are devices that have never been connected to before they've been added to the Atlas but we simply haven't had an initial connection with them so probably scanning ad devices for example and this machine simply never been connected once we do get an initial connection with it then we start monitoring and normally but until then we're not going to be flashing at you that this note is down because it's probably not moving over to the right you'll be able to see how much we're actually monitoring when it comes to netcrunch we license by a number of monitored notes and we don't limit you on performance counters or sensors or elements or anything like that one device is one note and as you can see here we have 324 network notes being monitored which is approximately 10,000 performance counters we call the performance counters other people might call them sensors other people might call them elements whatever it might be but this is just informational for you and you don't actually have any limitations here so 148 ports which is one node monitor everything that you want on it we actually are able to offer this kind of node base licensing because of the extreme scalability of netcrunch a single netcrunch server as we're saying here can support over 1 million monitored counters as of neck crunch 9.3 that's actually a great deal compared to the competition it's going to be in the low thousands to the low tens of thousands the server that I'm running is actually running on a VM and you can run any kind of netcrunch server on a VM without any performance degradation so whether you do run it on a physical machine or a virtual machine you're not going to see any cut in performance now I will point out a couple new things that we have in that crunch 9.3 and really I think the most important one of the most powerful one our integration profiles so as of 9.3 we actually have 19 different 2-way integrations with service desks and messaging systems so if you are using page or duty for ticketing or freshdesk MSPs often use connect wise you can send messages to Trello you can even create Twitter messages or send it to slack whenever an alert happens in netcrunch you can actually have it create a ticket or generate a message and it's two-way integration so in page your duty when you do close that event it will also close at a netcrunch as well and when it does come to these events as you can see here in our main dashboard at lists we do have an event log and what this is is showing you a breakdown of all the events that happened in the last hour broken down by the hour and if we click on any of these we'll be able to see more about what happened so in this case we can see between 3:00 and 4:00 p.m. now as you can see I'm getting some log-in failures or whatever it might be we do have some open alerts here that's this one the service is down and we do have some nodes close by correlation as well so neck crunch does close alerts automatically by correlation in this case this machine SNMP went down it lasted for 10 minutes but has since come back up so whether an admin fixed it or it simply resolved itself we were able to identify that it's been closed and it's not going to be flashing at you as something that needs your attention by being able to close alerts by correlation we're actually able to create a pending alerts of view for you and the pending alerts view is going to show you all the events that are currently happening on your network that need your attention and this is actually a very powerful feature because instead of having to sift through oh as you can see right there ping was down and now it's coming back up so machine is back online but by having this kind of view oh how nice is this having this kind of view means you're able to see the problems that are currently happening instead of having to sift through a list of all the events that happened and having to determine which one is still ongoing and which one is not we also do have a summary view here which will show you a summary of all the events that have happened and you can break them down by last 24 hours week last week or month and you can see here if I wanted to look at all the Cisco things I click here if I want to look at status as a net crunch I'd look here now going back I'm going to be going across the the right here.i things are actually our new views that have been updated and the GUI has been made much more easier and much more intuitive so this view as well as the top charts view that I'm going to be showing you in just a minute is available on custom views as well so what we are looking at of course is our global atlas all 324 nodes in this in the network but we also have custom views that are created for you automatically or based on whatever criteria that you like so if you select Windows Server you'll be able to see a similar view but it's only going to include those devices that are part of that view in this case Windows Server going back up I'll move over to the right and this is our top charts view out of the box we do have nine I think it is top charts set for you automatically and you can create top charts based on any kind of performance counters that you'd like this is of course adjustable however you'd like to and in this case let's say we want five elements per chart and it'll squeeze it down there as well it's adjustable movable however we'd like to we have a full-screen view and we have an auto zoom mode as well and the auto zoom mode well we'll simply make it look as good as possible on your own screens resolution like I said a little earlier everything is updated live and in real-time in this case we're showing recent values that means the most recently polled value and if something does flash blue that means that we recently got new information which can also look at a last hour and the last 24 hour average as well highlighting over any of these you can go into the node settings or you can let's show the counter history this view like all the other views are also optimized for multi-screen knock room settings so everything is actually dockable you go into Windows and you enable docking you'll be able to pull various windows out and throw them onto different screens well that's not something I can show you on this single screen presentation I can just open for example a new Atlas window and it'll be the same thing that we just saw but in its own window and you could throw this onto any other screens that are attached this like the main views are also going to be updated dynamically real time so it's nice if you do have multiple screens if you do not have multiple screens we actually also have a screen rotating feature or you can pick three or four of the main screens that you do want to take a look at and have them rotate every 30 seconds or whatever it might be so if you have an outward facing screen maybe looking over development or anything like that your employees we will take up and take a quick look at the status of the network and see what's going on now I did mention that we have uh we are Cisco partners and we are also the only certified Cisco compatible monitoring solution that is mainstream so that means we do have full support for NetFlow IP fix and we also support Cisco n/bar so if your devices do support n/bar you'll be able to get application definitions as well if you don't have a cisco n/bar we actually have our own Dilton application database as well with hundreds of different applications and of course you can create your own based on the port that the application is using we do also support sflow which includes all the all protocols that are based on Fez flow so in the case of juniper that's going to be J flow unfortunately here I don't have one to show you as an example because this is our backup development and testing lab as you can actually see there's actually very little data going on over here but you can see the application types that are topping we can see the port's that are we also see the top talkers and these top talkers are obviously the ones doing the most communication you can view this in bytes packets or flows however you'd like to and you can also click on any of these bars to get more information or go directly into our flow analytics window and the flow analytics window again it's going to show you some more granular information about what's going on who's talking to who so on and so forth so you can see the application groups the applications the protocols being used so on and so forth the Settings view that we have here is a little bit of a misnomer it is partially settings but it's also a way to learn more about neck crunch itself so here you can take a look at settings and get things done but if you want to learn more about managing user access to profiles or if we go down will be able to see setting up layer two segments how to set up your flow collector monitoring credential these kinds of things clicking on anything here is either going to open up a wizard or give you more information to accomplish whatever it is that you'd like to do so if you are having some questions this is obviously the first place that you want to go to now the server size view shows you the health of the server on which netcrunch itself is running for example if I haven't had backups written in a timely fashion or writing to the database is slow that's something notes show up here like I said we run on Windows Server 2008 r2 which can be on a VM and for most installations all we need is 4 gigabytes of RAM and four cores however if you did need more RAM or more cores to be applied this is where you'd be able to find out now I'm going to skip this for just a moment and we're going to go into our monitoring dependencies so our monitoring dependencies are branch out from the necrons server itself and we create these for you automatically and the purpose of monitoring dependencies is to prevent alert floods for example if this switch were to go down you don't want to get emails or SMS is that all the devices below it wink down as well it's going to be sufficient that you get the one critical alert that this one critical device is down of course you can adjust the dependencies however you'd like to and you can of course turn them off if you do want to get that flood of emails in a similar view we have our physical segments map and the physical segments map is going to show you the physical connections between your devices so that's that same course which that I showed you a little bit earlier and the lines actually represent the physical connections as you can see there are different thicknesses and there are different colors here as well what the thicknesses and colors actually represent is live traffic so we're currently showing live traffic and we can see that this one is taking up all of it and everyone else is being fairly quiet you do have the option to look at a last hour and a last 24 hours summary as well and you click on any of these we can take a look at the current traffic and status or we can look at a traffic history now and we've just had an update so let's see what that is and this opens up our net crunch trend viewer and the turn of you is going to show you the up and down interfaces here but you can also add any kind of trend to this viewer as well to see if you can find out maybe why this is happening and why there are spikes all these views are drillable you can go all the way down to the end point and this is a good way to find out where your bandwidth hogs are now one more thing I'll show you from this switch we do have a port mapping feature and the floor mapping feature is actually going to show you what's connected to every single port as well as what's connected on down the line as well now not all of these are added but that's for security reasons but you'll be able to see not only what device is connected to a specific port but you would also be able to see what's connected further on down the line as well for example here so these four devices and whether this is a population or security thing depending on your settings you'll be able to see what these specific devices are as well moving on down like I said earlier we do have our own custom views yellow ones for example are going to show you devices that have a problem whereas red is going to show you devices that we have no connection with whatsoever so we can't do an overview look like this as well we can do the top charts view and we have the map view as well we also have custom mapping features and you can make custom maps based on any kind of criteria that you would like to we do have Windows performance views as well we'll just performance views we have multiple ways that we can actually show you performance so as you can see here we do have gauges we do have line graphs we do have bar graphs different kinds of data are obviously better represented in different ways going back up we're going to start back up at our main global atlas and I'll start moving over here so you can take a look at all the nodes that are in our global atlas these are all the devices that we are currently monitoring and some basic information about them as well you can see we're running monitoring checks every 5 minutes but you can adjust that however you like to it's simply our default recommended one in most cases five minutes is going to suffice but for your critical devices we also recommend maybe one minute here you'll see the services that are being monitored the monitoring engines so on and so forth and we also break this down so these are all your windows 2 for example and for all your Windows devices we actually offer an inventory function as well so here we'll be able to see what's on board all of your Windows machines this view might be a little limited but what you can actually do is right-click and go into the inventory view and get a comprehensive interview look the hardware that's onboard the operating system that's running and even the hot fixes and the hot fixes that have installed you can actually right click on any of them view details and it's going to open up the Microsoft page for that specific hot fix while I'm here I'll actually I see I have this open as well with netcrunch we actually include graph crunch which is our own Fork of the popular open-source dashboarding utility graph Anna and with graph crunch especially after 9.3 you're actually able to use it to show not only data from different sources but from multiple netcrunch servers as well so if you are running multiple nekron servers you can use graph crunch as a way to visualize all of them instead of just a single one this is included free of charge and we are currently working on getting on board with the main graph on a line as well going back up you can see we have a breakdown for Linux Mac OSX so on and so forth and we have a new search feature as well so if you do search for anything here you'll be able to not only find our database but you'll also be able to search via here we go by our nodes by views our blogs are actually searchable here as well so all the information that you would ever need to find about netcrunch can be found here and we'll just scroll down a little bit and that's going to be the end of my little presentation here so thanks for watching I do recommend that you guys install neck crunch you can get us at wwm SOUTHCOM when you do download neck crunch you get 30 days of free tech support on our unlimited node license and on top of that we actually offer free installation assistance as well so we can schedule a webinar like this with one of our engineers and they can actually help you get neck crunch setup as a proof of concept on your own system

Channel: Adrem Software, Inc.

Views: 17,023

Keywords: SysAdmin, Network Monitoring, Server Monitoring, Application Monitoring, Network Monitoring Software, Network Monitoring System, DevOps, ITSM, Tech, Technology, Networking, Cisco, VMWare, Microsoft

Id: bguODo6CtRE

Length: 19min 55sec (1195 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 26 2016