I was just alerted to a new article about Network Node Manager i software (NNMi) in Government Computer News titled Kansas reins in its networks. I got a laugh out of this quote:

"Although child labor is not part of the Kansas cost saving's plan, Steves said the NNMi interface is simple enough that his 10-year-old daughter is able to find what devices are down in the network, what is working and what neighborhoods they are in, and what performance is not within normal parameters."

I'm going to tell HR we have a new recruit.

More seriously, we contacted Scott Steves and he is going to do some blog posts for us, so stay tuned for those.

I can tell you we spent a huge amount of time working to make NNM i-series easy to use. I can't say it was the #1 item but the core values we designed to were (in alphabetic order):

• Accurate discovery - we moved to continuous spiral discovery
• Ease of use - hey, the 10-year-old figured it out, enough said
• High scale - latest tests show 18K nodes, 900K discovered interfaces, 90K polled @ 5mins
• Integration for extended value - web services for integration, we have AlarmPoint and NetScout integrated. One of our engineers did a great presentation at the HP Software Universe in Las Vegas, I'll blog more about this in another post
• Management by exception - you see this in the GUI, but what makes it work is the deterministic RCA of the new causal engine

If you have used NNMi, what has been your experience?

For the Network Management Center - Michael Procopio