If you've seen the latest revision of Network Node Manager i 8.x, then you know that us folks in the R&D labs have been burning the midnight oil.  There are a ton of new functions and features, but the one that is closest to my heart is the iSPI Performance. This performance monitoring add-on to NNMi made its debut with NNMi version 8.01 and is following up with a second, enhanced release to coincide with NNMi 8.10.

As an architect within the Network Management Center, and an engineer on the team producing the iSPI Performance, I'll be making regular blog entries on this new product line and how it can help your network environment.  Occasionally we might veer off into uncharted territory but that is as much up to you as me.

Today I'm covering the various launch mechanisms for the iSPI Performance from NNMi. 

Following the installation of the iSPI, your NNMi box will begin to collect performance data and the iSPI will receive and process this data. You can control the collections using previously grayed out toggle buttons in the monitoring configuration windows of NNMi. But how do you get access to this data? There will be a new 'Action' in your drop down list called 'Reporting - Report Menu'. Clicking on this action will launch a browser displaying a catalog of reports which are available, some show live data (highly granular and right up to the minute), while others show hourly grain summary data over a much longer period. You'll also see archival reports with the fine grain collected data available over an extended period.

This 'Report Menu' is your main launch point into the iSPI Performance reports.  If you have selected an element within NNMi then that's going to get passed through to the report and everything you view will be filtered to just that element.  When I say element, I mean a node, a node group, an interface or an interface group.  You can launch the 'Report Menu' action from the maps, from an incident or from any of the tabular lists within NNMi.  So let's say you see an incident on NNMi saying that an interface has gone down - you can now launch directly into the iSPI Performance reports and check the historical availability of that interface to see how frequently this has been happening and for how long each time.

There's one other launch mechanism to launch from NNMi to the iSPI Performance that won't show up immediately - that’s the Path Health report action.  If you're looking at a path view on NNMi you will now have a new action - 'Reporting - Path Health'.  Selecting this will pass all the nodes and interfaces along your path into the iSPI Performance and you'll see a report on historical usage and exceptions for each node and interface. Now, in one easy step you can see the complete performance for everything along an entire path and pinpoint where the failure is.

Next time I'll talk more about data granularity and what the three types of reports are (Live, Summary, and Archive). If you've seen the iSPI Performance then let me know what you thought, if you have questions or suggestions for future posts then leave a comment.