Tag: opEvents

opEvents Prevents Event Storms During A Snowstorm

by Craig Nelson | May 26, 2021 | Automation, Blog Post, MSP, opEvents

I dropped into a quarterly business review that one of the Account Managers was doing with one of our customers last week. I like to do this from time to time to hear it for myself directly from the customer. It helps me understand the customers and gives me an opportunity to discuss our platform post sale and integration.

This particular customer is a Telecommunications Carrier out of North America who runs a lot of wireless and fibre and are rapidly expanding.

The Head of Network Operations was on the call, and for the purposes of keeping the identity private, let’s call him Joe.

Joe talked about the snowstorms and how it impacts their network and field services team. The way it works is that the NOC team gets an alert, does some diagnosis and decides what process needs to occur. To send field service staff means that the problem is something that cannot be remotely fixed. Sending the team out in bad weather to work on wireless equipment is hard on the people who do the work, but at the end of the day, to quote Joe, “we pride ourselves on great customer service.”

Before this customer had opEvents installed, they would have a high rate of field service calls that would result in no fault found during snowstorms. This means that the field services team were not being sent to fix real field related problems. For any company with a field services team, you know how important it is to send these guys to real problems.

The impact for the customer was that to clear all the events would take days, with over 50% being false reports.

During recent snowstorms, opEvents would handle the alert and find the source problem. The NOC team then could send the field services team out in the snow to investigate and fix the problems. Joe said that the level of accuracy in the alerts was fantastic and the NOC and Field Services Team rebuilt their trust and had confidence that they were being sent to a real fault.

When Joe studied the impact that the Opmantek Platform brought to the table, opEvents reduced event storms to zero, deduplication was no longer a problem and only pushed real events to the team. Field service calls were reduced and the network was brought back to normal in half the time.

“We had a lot of competitors’ customers switch to us during the snowstorms. The amount of downtime we suffered was minimal as we were right on top of any faults, we knew where they were and their severity and deployed our field services team accurately. It puts us ahead of the market.”

Introducing Programmable Button Actions

by Daniel Carter | Jan 7, 2021 | Automation, Blog Post, Company Culture, MSP, NMIS, opConfig, opEvents

Opmantek has long believed that Operational Process Automation is one of the foundational pillars that a successful network management strategy is built upon. One key piece to this is to ensure that actions are undertaken in a consistent manner each time, there should be no variance from what is outlined as the standard protocol. opEvents has introduced programmable button actions that help assist organisations in replicating troubleshooting actions and escalation procedures further solidifying opEvents as a technical service desk.

The buttons use the same pipeline as scripts in EventActions but now operators have the ability to manually kick off an action for an event. One of the most common actions will be to create a ticket in your issue tracking system, in our case we will create a Jira Ticket.

Configuration

To start create the following file in omk/conf/table_schemas/opEvents_action-buttons.json This must be valid JSON schema or the buttons will fail to render. You should see an error in opEvents.log if this is the case. [ { “description”: “Example Events Button Action”, “label”: “Create Ticket”, “fa_icon”: “fas fa-jira”, “script”: “create_ticket”, “tags”: [“ticket”] } ]

Then add the following policy in omk/conf/EventActions.json|.nmis that triggers show_button.tag() EventActions.json “policy”: { “5”: { “IF”: “event.any”, “THEN”: “show_button.ticket()”, “BREAK”: “true” }, }

& EventActions.nmis %hash = ( ‘policy’ => { ‘5’ => { IF => ‘event.any’, THEN => ‘show_button.create_ticket()’, BREAK => ‘true’ }, } );

These are the supported keys and how the change operation and look of the button.

Key	Type	Required	Description
script	String	Yes	Name of the script defined in EventActions.json
label	String	Yes	Label which the button will display to the user
description	String	optional	Tool-tip help text to be displayed when you mouse over the button
tags	array[string]	optional	If no tags are defined the button will show on all events, if tags are defined the button will only show on events which have been tagged with show_button.tag_name()
run_once	boolean	optional	If set to true the button will look for script.script_name key on the event, if found the button will disable itself. This allows manual actions to only be triggered once. Will not influence any defined EventActions.json operations.
fa_icon	string	optional	Icon to be displayed from the Font Awesome library shipped with opEvents example: “fas fa-table-tennis” Icons here.
class	string	optional	Define a css class to colour the button, see Notes on Button Classes below to see a list of supported types.

Notes on Font Awesome

In opEvents-3.2.2 we are shipping the library 5.12.1 In opEvents-2.6.1 we are shipping the library 5.8.2

opEvents v3.2.2 New Release

by Daniel Carter | Jan 6, 2021 | opEvents, Releases

opEvents 2.6.1 has now been officially released.

opEvents has had the ability to perform troubleshooting and remediation scripts when an event occurs; this is quintessential to remediating events without requiring intervention. However, what about when you want to run these scripts on events that have not been remediated?

With the introduction of ‘Programmable Action Buttons’ engineers can now perform these actions ad-hoc and all the resulting information is stored in the event itself. Any script that has been created, including the ones that are supplied by Opmantek, can have an actionable button created to perform it, you can even take this a step further and push tickets into your ticketing system from these events. This further enhances opEvents as an engineer focused support platform.

Download opEvents today and continue your automation journey.

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[USER STORY] Expandable and Flexible Solutions

by Daniel Carter | May 28, 2020 | NMIS, opEvents, User Story

One of the most important features to your network management platform is for it to be able to work alongside your existing systems, there are very few new networks that are built. At Opmantek, we get many requests about integration with help desk systems and it is a very straight forward process for our software. To find out more, either read the user story below or book a demo in the form at the bottom.

Download the User Story

Book a Demo

Agile RMM solutions for MSPs

by Jessica Hall | Apr 30, 2020 | Blog Post, NMIS, opCharts, opEvents, opHA, opTrend

Remote monitoring and management (RMM) is the process of tracking, monitoring, and managing endpoints for multiple clients. It is mostly used by managed service providers (MSPs) to provide IT services to organisations who outsource their IT requirements. Read on to find out how a self-hosted RMM solution can help MSPs to increase functionality and save on operational costs.

Are you an MSP that wants to replace expensive RMM systems with a better solution?

As an MSP, did you know that you can replace multi-million dollar RMM systems by combining NMIS with opHA and opCharts? Opmantek offers a full-service software solution that is made to scale. Our products can be used in synergy, as a complete solution.

What do our RMM software solution products include?

NMIS

NMIS is one of the world’s most popular network management systems. Manage anything at any scale. Extend NMIS with our modules and increase your performance, awareness and control.

opHA

opHA allows you to boost the performance of applications and deliver high scale and high availability environments, which includes the geographical distribution of the system and overlapping IP address ranges.

opCharts

Featuring dynamic charting, custom dashboards and a RESTful API to visualize NMIS data and more, opCharts provides a single pane of glass through which you can view all managed customer equipment. This allows engineers to drill down from a single device in a remote location, yet still enabling customers to view their own sites privately and in the moment.

opEvents

opEvents effectively helps to reduce the impact of network faults and failures using proactive event management.

opTrend

opTrend allows you to proactively manage network resources by visually analysing key performance metrics.

Why should I choose Opmantek over a cloud-based SaaS solution?

In recent times, there has been a shift towards software as a Service (SaaS) and one-size-fits-all cloud-based solutions. However, we have found that our customers require flexibility and bespoke solutions that can grow with each individual business. Disappointed by current SaaS offerings, more and more MSPs are now looking for evolved solutions.

Facilitates scalability

As you have the control, scalability potential is naturally increased, to enable your RMM to grow with your business. The scalability of the software allows for your needs to be met in the future, not just at this present moment. In today’s unpredictable business landscape, scalability is essential for success. However, as businesses grow and change, many SaaS providers force their users into unnecessary paid upgrades.

More visibility and control over your network

Opmantek software can be deployed in the cloud or on-premise but because you retain ownership of the database and have access to the source code at the core of NMIS, you have more control over your managed devices and network data. Data ownership is another key security concern for many companies, a concern which Opmantek directly addresses.

Easy to integrate with other services

If you already have multiple different products performing unique functions within your network environment, it is unlikely that you will want to or be able to replace them all at once. To make it easy, at Opmantek our RMM software is easy to integrate for a fully cohesive solution. We offer multiple integration options, including for REST APIs (HTTP(S), batch operations and the information provided in JSON files and CSV forms.

Unmatched automation technology

Our automated network monitoring is above industry standard and allows you to provide the best service possible to clients.

We make it easy for you to increase profitability

You can save money for your MSP, with a solution that grows with and adapts to your business, removing the regular expensive upgrade fees charged by SaaS software providers. As part of the changeover period, we offer a full onboarding service. Your designated team will be there with you along the way, answering your questions and making the transition seamless. Our support services can be easily accessed at any time.

A bespoke solution for your business

If you want to experience a RMM solution that is tailored to your business requirements, you can try it out for yourself with no commitment! Simply opt-in for an Opmantek RMM software demo request to get started.

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