NETWORK MANAGEMENT & MONITORING

HP’s Intelligent Management Center (IMC) is one of the leading Network Management and Monitoring tools. It is built on the ISO FCAPS  model and framework.

FCAPS stands for

The IMC is a robust software platform that is built for enterprises and business entities with branch offices distributed across geographies. It does more than just monitoring, alerting and analysis, as it offers covers the FCAPS model at various levels. The base model offers all the elements of the FCAPS, but with its addon modules, HP has made this a truly comprehensive, versatile and powerful tool.

IMC integrates console allows for fault management, element configuration and network monitoring. To make it truly the tool of choice for network managers and administrators, HP has also built-in management capability third party devices.

Its modular approach makes it easy to manage SDNs using the Virtual Application Network Manager module. Additionally, it offers APIs to connect to other ITIL management tools, like trouble ticketing systems making it easy to build rules to automatically generate trouble tickets based on events.

Besides high-level troubleshooting and analysis, it offers low-level features such as automated configuration compare to raise alerts if any changes are detected and a manual configuration compare allowing the configuration of two different devices to be compared side-by-side. This is a huge time-saver for Network admins while trouble shooting during a networking outage.

OUR APPROACH

We have devised a series of steps to ensure that the implementation of IMC in any environment goes smoothly and successfully. We follow a series of steps to ensure that the customer receives the full benefits of the product and its capability.

ANALYSIS

The primary objective in this phase is to gather data about the customer’s environment. This is can be done remotely, however, we believe that face to face meetings are best as they tend to bring out the small yet very pertinent differences in every environment. This forms the basis for the implementation high-level approach and plan. This phase also ensures that the licensing requirements are finalized so that there are no surprises at the implementation phase.

ASSESSMENT

After the requirements and approach are finalized, the assessment stage goes over the various requirements and expected output. The various aspects fo the integration is detailed and the low-level design is concluded. The design is then finalized and the implementation hand-book and verification tests are created.

IMPLEMENTATION

During this phase, the system is installed, license keys are verified and patches deployed. After the installation and configuration, the complete system and its integration is verified by going over the verification tests. Most third party device MIBs will be loaded and complied at this stage and the SNMP response from the devices will be verified for compliance. The topology maps are built and verified.

HANDOVER

At this stage the administration training for customers is done as part of the knowledge transfer. This allows the customer to start managing and maintaining the system with minimal external support. In addition, any necessary system optimization is done as well.

KEY FEATURES OF IMC