To help accomplish its goals, the school has put in place a state-of-the-art data network. Over the years, as the school has grown, so has the network, to over 200 network devices and 3,500 computers. The JHSPH IT staff needed help in monitoring and maintaining this massive infrastructure.
Kevin Stone, a Senior Network Administrator on the IT team supporting the JHSPH infrastructure, has evaluated and utilized numerous tools to aid in the ongoing support of the JHSPH network. “Of all the tools I evaluated, NetMRI provides the most useful information in a single place—I can tell how the network is doing by looking at one screen,” said Stone. “We can begin our day by looking at the Network Health Report produced by NetMRI, and know what kind of day we’ll have based on the overall health of the network.”
After a successful year using NetMRI to continuously analyze and improve their network, JHSPH added the new VoIP module to help manage and control their new VoIP projects.
NetMRI’s VoIP module determines the actual quality of IP phone calls by evaluating Call Data Records (CDRs) for delay, jitter and dropped packets. It also correlates abnormalities with other contributory network events, and provides helpful detail to solve the issues. NetMRI’s VoIP module pulls CDRs from Cisco’s CallManager.
“The ability of NetMRI VoIP to identify poor call paths and then isolate the issue down to the device or system is very helpful,” said Kevin Stone, Senior Network Administrator at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “NetMRI-VoIP provides key useful information that we can act upon, in a manner that is intuitive and accessible. It is more than just graphs and statistics—it identifies the real issues to resolve to maintain high quality.”
Johns Hopkins has found that NetMRI’s proactive and intuitive systems-level approach provides control and significant savings in troubleshooting time and expense across their network infrastructure, and that NetMRI’s product innovation has been a good match for their own new network technology deployments and operational needs.
“Without NetMRI we would have had to hunt down a recent configuration file if we didn’t have the most recent settings. It turned a potentially full-day job into half an hour. It literally took five minutes to locate the configuration settings."
"With NetMRI 3.0 the preparation for our VoIP system roll out took two hours instead of two fulldays. The process was incredibly smooth and saved us a huge amount of time.”
—Damian Kramer, Operations Manager, IT Department
Jesus College has come a long way since it was founded in 1496 in buildings previously used by a nunnery. Though still a peaceful campus, methods of education and communication have changed dramatically. Its 15 campus buildings are now connected via a network that carries voice, data and video.
As the college expands the role of its network, it has become considerably more complex over time.
“The network has become a core part of our infrastructure, so managing that is a high priority,” said Damian Kramer, operations manager, IT department. “Before it just carried data for computers. Now we run CCTV over it, use it for access control for doors and gates, and carry voice traffic on it.”
The IT department runs 10 different virtual local area networks (VLANs) for business functions in the college with about 45 Cisco switches. When the IT team needed to switch one VLAN to another, Kramer previously wrote a script and web interface to accomplish that.
The IT department also lacked any way to track configuration changes, or evaluate historical or current network settings. When a problem occurred, finding the root of issues required significant investigation and time.
“Intermittent problems would crop up, and with some, we would never fully get to the bottom of them,” Kramer said. “It could take a day or two to investigate.”
IT evaluated several network monitoring solutions, including CiscoWorks. The college found that Infoblox’s NetMRI offered more capabilities for automating configuration tracking and changes than any other product on the market. NetMRI provides a network configuration and change management (NCCM) platform with built-in intelligence and analysis.
“We could plug in NetMRI without having to set up and install a server,” Kramer said. “Other solutions would have taken more time to set up and to hunt down affected ports on the network.”
As expected, implementation of NetMRI went very smoothly. “It was extremely simple to set up. We plugged it in and off we went. There was very little to do in terms of configuration,” Kramer said. “Within a couple of hours–at most–we were getting information.”
When Kramer begins each day, he looks at NetMRI’s scorecard for an overview of the state of the network. Any dips in that score cue the team to drill down further into possible problems. Though the college’s score started off high, it’s improved even further since installing NetMRI– now at 9.7 out of 10.
Soon after bringing in NetMRI, the college experienced a switch outage. Because NetMRI had collected and backed up configurations for all switches, IT had up-to-date settings for the affected hardware. When the team replaced the previous switch with a new one, they loaded it with the same settings as before.
“Without NetMRI we would have had to hunt down a recent configuration file if we didn’t have the most recent settings,” Kramer said. “It turned a potentially full-day job into half an hour. It literally took five minutes to locate the configuration settings.”
As the college continues to upgrade its network and adds voice telephony, additional NetMRI capabilities will help IT manage those changes. NetMRI’s IP Telephony for Cisco automates the collection of voice data such as call data records, network configuration, SNMP and syslog data to provide a complete picture of what may be impacting the VoIP service. IT can visually see each call made, the path the call took across the network and the issues across that path. As a result, IT will be able to prevent outages before end users notice any problems and restore services more quickly.
Additionally, Infoblox’s Firewall management capabilities will monitor and report changes with firewalls and routers. NetMRI’s Quality of Service detects packet losses across different types of network traffic and misuse of queues, letting IT know whenever performance issues arise.
Kramer sees the addition of NetMRI as a key step toward making IT more efficient and proactive. “NetMRI reduces complexity in our environment,” he said. “Once it’s working, you just let it go. It allows us to get on with other stuff we need to do.”
When the University of Cambridge decided to roll out a VoIP system across all of its colleges, Jesus College was in an enviable position. Already seeing a network score “well into the nines”, the decision was made for the college to upgrade to NetMRI 3.0.
Jesus College needed to prepare its network for the installation. This included the reconfiguration of about 20 switches across various different VLANs. “The flexibility offered by NetMRI 3.0 was outstanding,” Kramer said. “Without its insight and analytics, it would have taken two days to configure each switch individually. In this instance it took an hour or two to create the script and ten minutes to run.”
Automation played an invaluable role in the VoIP installation, as did the new product interface. Kramer continued: “Immediate benefit was evident from the beginning. The charts and graphs provide a great visual overview and are extremely easy to navigate. Speed is also a key asset, with valuable real time data continuously in front of you.”
As soon as the VoIP roll out was complete, everything worked perfectly. “It was a doddle,” Kramer concluded. “NetMRI 3.0 made this task a really smooth process that worked immediately.”
Jesus College
Cambridge, UK
NetMRI®
