PathSolutions Solution Overview with Tim Titus

so a little bit of introduction uh since many of you may not know me tim titus chief technical officer also founder of pass solutions my background is i've been a network engineer for three decades there's a little bit of gray hair there that should help prove that started back in the days of coax arc net dip switches novel netware so i've been fighting network problems for really most of my entire career one of the things that frustrated me and i'm certain frustrates a lot of folks out there is troubleshooting the problem with troubleshooting is that you have to say gee go set your monitoring software to go collect certain pieces of information and then you realize you don't have enough information and you have to go collect more information and you use a variety of different methods to collect the information then you have to put the pieces together typically this is a manual process and if you don't have all the right pieces you're not going to come up with the right conclusions so this means that if a user has a problem that means that you say gee i couldn't find it maybe the next time this happens we'll get a little closer that frustrated me and i figured there needs to be automation for troubleshooting so i looked around and realized most of the monitoring software that's out there doesn't really do automation of troubleshooting you can build your own automation if you want to but if you wanted something out of the box that you could deploy and have it analyze your entire infrastructure and tell you everything that your network equipment knows at that point you could start being proactive and so that was really our dream so i think many folks will end up seeing a network that ends up looking like this you set up your monitoring server you set up a database you set up a couple of remote collectors to deal with scalability issues then you set it to monitor your switches routers gateways and firewalls and this tends to be a bit of a manual exercise if you miss anything well then oops in addition you want more information in a few select areas on your network so you go out and you manually configure monitoring of your internet connection maybe your wan connections maybe some trunk ports so you go out and do this and at this point you say i've spent months configuring this and this is the visibility i have and maybe you're also run out of licenses because this is as far as you've been able to purchase at this point when a user has a problem they're going to say hey i had a slowdown i had a database drop a connection on me i had a call quality issue or a video conferencing issue okay you check your monitoring software and your monitoring software says everything's good what that is is it's a disconnect between the reality that's actually occurring on your network and what your monitoring software is aware of so that means you're left having it stuck log into switches log into routers check interfaces check error counters check configuration looking for that needle in a haystack as to what caused the user's problem sadly if the problem isn't happening when you're looking you're not likely to actually find it so this just leads to a frustrated user you're frustrated your management's frustrated and the problem doesn't go resolved for either days or weeks or even months before people can find it so i figured the automation of troubleshooting really needed to come into play and again the other monitoring software their manual you can set up monitoring of whatever you want but that takes effort knowledge and time so here's what we decided to do in automating the troubleshooting we have a solution that deploys on a single virtual machine in your environment it's going to go out and automatically find every switch router gateway and firewall and monitor all of the devices as well as every interface on every device if you think about it you're held to be responsible by your management by your user community to be responsible for the entire network we're going to give you visibility that matches your responsibility secondly we're going to go deep no matter what make or model or manufacture this equipment is we're going out to automatically collect the performance the configuration 19 different error counters all the qos cdp lldp poe all of this information automatically collected and then we take this information back and put it through a heuristics engine the heuristics engine analyzes and comes up with plain english diagnostics whether it's a bad cable it's a qos mis configuration duplex mismatch micro burst link flood we're going to be able to say here's what's going on in your network so that within the hour of deployment that you take we're going to tell you here's everything that's broken now if you knew everything your network equipment knew within the first hour of deployment you'd say let's start proactively fixing these things and instead of running a network that's full of mystery and unknown you're able to run a network that's perfectly operating because you know everything your network equipment knows now to round this out we have everything needed to run a perfectly healthy network including diagramming path mapping port mapping server monitoring service monitoring uh inventory net flow ipam uh and also configuration automation for deployment of configurations and backups of configurations so everything needed to run a perfectly healthy network so that's our core offering we don't chin some things we include all of this in the core offering so that everything needed is included now we do have some optional modules one optional module is our telecom module what that includes is the ability to do call path mapping so if somebody says they had a poor quality uc call or voip call we can path map and show every link switch and router used to connect any two endpoints and show here's what happened along that path so in that sense you could say gee we're a little like netbrain except we're like netbrain with the root cause answer of what happened along the path at any point in time that way we can tell you your call that happened around 230 it was bad because we had a qos misconfiguration and a few minutes later we had a bad station cord causing packet loss so you get the root cause answer with one report and one tool in addition we have apm so we have a call simulator that you can use to simulate synthetic voice traffic across the lan across the land or all the way end to end to determine quickly where do we have latency jitter packet loss out of order packets or loss of dsep tag the telecom module also includes full visibility into cisco qos queues we'll do sip trunk monitoring and troubleshooting we can locate your phones and trigger alerts if phones move we do moscow monitoring so everything needed for a perfectly healthy voice environment next is those work-at-home users so if we go through a sample scenario you have a cfo working from home they have a poor quality zoom team meeting if you scope the problem out you recognize there's the internet part there's the zoom team cloud server component there's your headquarters component and then there's the user's home office in their home office they have a 29 dollar firewall some completely unknown brand of access point and they have their laptop now in this environment you can have a bevy of errors you can have weak wireless signal strength wireless channel contention in the neighborhood firewall issues isp issues split tunneling issues so if you try and help this user out and say hey let me see if i can solve your problem the first thing you try and do is say let's schedule a meeting where i can work with you on this and the user and your schedule only seems to coordinate maybe two days from now at two days they try and get into the meeting and their packet loss is too high or the latency is too high they can't get into the meeting even if they do get into the meeting and they pass control over to you the only tools available to you are ping and trace route not a whole lot of usefulness so here's how we decided to come at the problem what we do is you send the user a single agent and say here non-technical user run this they run that it's going to perform a batch set of tests against all of these different elements bring that information back according to the user's perspective of the network so you get their take on what's going on in the network that information then gets put together and sent back to the total view server and then you as the engineer get an email notification saying the lab results are in the doctor can now review what's going on at that point you look in and say okay looks like your cpu and memory that's good so your laptop's healthy uh looks like your wireless signal strength is low i'm going to suggest you move to a different location or plug in also in your neighborhood if you are going to use wireless everyone's using wireless channel 3. if you change that you're going to have a better time also your firewall is adding a bunch of latency your isp is having some really bad slowdowns so with all of this information super technical information automatically collected by the non-technical user presented to you so that you can end up looking through and saying here's five things you can do to improve your work at home environment that just means that you're not spending hours trying to solve a problem because you don't have the right tools available you have all the information in front of you so that you get the problem solved quickly now you can also have users do their own wireless signal strength mapping exercise of their house so here's a screenshot example and you can see the rssi signal strength on the left side it was kind of yellow i started that test in my kitchen as i picked up my laptop i would start walking around and second by second it would update to show what the wireless signal strength actually is that way when i walked into the living room it was nice bright green as i walked out the back door into my yard it quickly dropped to yellow red and then black as the signal strength just completely dropped away so what this means is you're going to have all of the ability to help those users who are working at home help them solve problems because you have the information in front of you so with this we figure we have all of the information on your wired network on your data center network on your work at home users on voip and uc that you can root cause troubleshoot all of these problems with ease if you guys have questions i'd be willing to take those questions tim i've got one around the automated discovery of the infrastructure and how was that handled in past solutions am i setting up subnets to constantly scan am i setting up seed routers what does that look like so we have currently it's based upon subnets to scan to find devices we are adding seed router in our very next release so that's coming very soon but it's effectively is since we know everything about the existing devices that are there we're going to say gee we're plugged we're monitoring a cisco switch for example we know what's plugged into every port on that switch if we see cdp or lldp information for some new device that's plugged in we can go out and start talking to it to say okay what are these new devices do they respond to management can we get information off of them so what kind of devices are you supporting for those discoveries so it's really anything that responds to snmp and it's snmp v1 v2c v3 and cisco's high encryption uh v3 as well if you deploy a new network device does it automatically discover uh the new device or do you have to tell it to like initiate another scan so you can tell it to initiate a scan to immediately have that happen or you can have automated scans saying generally people do once and once a day because their network is not changing that rapidly that they figure once a day they'll have a scan to say okay we found this new device looks like it's a printer we found this new device responds to public it's sitting under somebody's desk and it's some old netgear switch that somebody said gee that's not part of the infrastructure we don't want it here but we'll still discover that sort of stuff as well so the trick is is that the knowledge is out there your network equipment has all of this information and i think what needs to come to an end is the day and age where network engineers are scraping devices hunting around for clues to try and solve problems those need to be automatically found automatically collected bubbled up to say hey you have a a trunk port problem over here you have a microburst link flood with the answers given to you in plain english it means you can start being proactive about solving these problems because the finding and interrogation of the stuff is completely automated

Channel: Tech Field Day

Views: 271

Keywords: Tech Field Day, Gestalt IT

Id: pGWPWcJdHgs

Length: 13min 31sec (811 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 17 2021