Optimize Network Asset Organization with Global Collections in DX NetOps

One thing most IT and network operations teams continue to contend with is more: more technologies, more vendors, more devices, and more complexity. Given these realities, its vital for network operations teams to minimize operational overhead wherever and whenever possible.

While managing and tracking each network device individually works fine in a small, static network environment, it’s not viable in the large-scale, dynamic networks modern enterprises rely upon. The more teams can intelligently group and organize assets, the more effective they can be, and ultimately, the more they’ll be able scale and enhance operations. This post examines how the Global Collections feature in DX NetOps helps teams group and manage elements more efficiently.

How DX NetOps can help

Network Observability by Broadcom offers comprehensive capabilities for capturing comprehensive monitoring data. Further, it affords teams a great deal of flexibility in how they leverage the intelligence gathered. The Global Collection capabilities in DX NetOps Spectrum are a prime example of this. Global Collections offer a powerful, flexible way to group devices and assets.
These capabilities can be especially valuable for teams managing large, complex network environments. In DX NetOps Spectrum, teams typically use criteria like topology, organization, and location to create groupings of devices.

DX NetOps discovers topology and connectivity relationships, and this intelligence can be used to assign membership in a Global Collection. For example, a customer created a Global Collection of devices that had no neighbors. If DX NetOps Spectrum couldn’t discover neighbor relationships, the solution’s built-in fault isolation functionality would not work. They found that a large number of devices in their network were included in this collection. Upon further investigation, they determined that Link Layer Discovery Protocol (LLDP) had been disabled on these devices. The team was able to swiftly enable LLDP for the entire Global Collection. Once LLDP was enabled, DX NetOps was able to accurately discover connectivity and therefore fault isolation would work as intended. Without this, hundreds of extraneous alarms would have been generated.

Out of the box, the solution features “organization” and “owner” attributes. These attributes can be used to assign membership in organization-specific Global Collections. Many customers use this approach to assess the impact of an alarm and to track assets for chargebacks.

Location-based collections can make use of the standard SNMP sysLocation field, which is commonly configured on devices. Collections can also be created based on other available attributes, including “location,” “office,” and others. Customers have used this capability to understand how regional issues—including power outages, extreme weather, and other factors—impact their network.

Global Collection: Key capabilities

Global Collections give teams a great deal flexibility. With Global Collections, teams can group devices, interfaces, components, and virtually any other asset they’re managing. These collections can then be used to:

• Guide monitoring policy, such as applying consistent polling intervals.
• Group alarms and enhance notifications and escalations.
• Enforce network configuration policies.
• View events, topology, metrics, and more within the context of Global Collections.
• Incorporate Global Collection data into dashboards and reports, which can be synchronized with DX NetOps Portal.
• Apply automation to specific groups.

Here are a few ways teams could use Global Collections:

• A network operations team responsible for managing an MPLS network wants to consistently monitor all interfaces that connect to a specific ISP’s cloud.
• A team wants to build a Global Collection for all routers running BGP so they can apply consistent configuration policies.
• Teams can establish groups of devices based on network role, such as core, access, and edge, and then apply uniform configuration policies based on these roles.
• Teams can create views, dashboards, and notification policies based on the line of business, customer, or service that the grouped devices support.

Ways to create Global Collections

In DX NetOps Spectrum, teams can create Global Collections in different ways:

• Static. Teams can create static groups via the graphical user interface (GUI), REST application programming interface (API), or command line interface (CLI).
• Dynamic. Global Collections can be created in a dynamic fashion, including via GUI, API, and CLI. These collections can be created based on a wide range of attributes, including external attributes, such as properties, which generally line up with SNMP values. They can also be assigned via internal attributes, including condition, alarm status, or whether in maintenance mode. For example, teams can create a Global Collection for a specific class of routers that has a condition that equals normal and have membership in that group periodically updated. 

How it works

Here’s an overview of how teams create Global Collections. Users start by defining the new collection in DX NetOps Spectrum. They create a new Global Collection, give it a name, specify which landscape it belongs to, and hit ok.

Global Collections can consist of models from one or more landscapes. (Landscapes are network domains managed by a single SpectroSERVER.) One model can belong to multiple Global Collections. Unlike other groupings, such as topology or organization, there are no restrictions on membership. A Global Collection can include any model type, including interfaces, routers, switches, containers, and applications. To create hierarchies, users can save groups in folders and subfolders. 

Teams can also use capabilities for relations and associations to group different models. For example, users can establish that router one is adjacent to router two, or that a specific universe collects data from a specific router.

Restrictions, limitations, and cautions

Global Collections can’t be nested, that is, users can’t have one collection that includes another. When using either APIs or CLI to work with Global Collections in distributed environments that feature multiple landscapes, be aware of the “local” Global Collection model on each landscape. For example, in an environment where a Global Collection exists on five landscapes, there will be a “local” Global Collection model on each of those landscapes. You’ll see these models via API or REST, but they will be consolidated in the user interface.  Administrators want to ensure that any associations are established between a Global Collection model and member models that reside on the same landscape. In these cases, it is important to avoid creating associations across different landscapes.  Doing so can introduce unpredictable behavior.   

In creating dynamic Global Collections, teams want to be careful about using external attributes. When external attributes are used, it can trigger a lot of external polls, which can have a negative impact on performance. To limit this performance impact, one alternative approach is to do periodic updates of external values and save them in memory, and use those values for dynamic Global Collections.

Conclusion

DX NetOps features a range of features and capabilities that help teams scale and optimize network operations. The Global Collection feature represents one prime example of the solution’s power and flexibility, helping teams adapt their approaches to their specific environments, while maximizing efficiency. To learn more, be sure to watch our Small Bytes session, How to Use NetOps Global Collections to Organize Network Assets.

This Small Bytes series offers practical examples on getting the most from Broadcom solution investments. Visit our Small Bytes page to see a complete list of upcoming and on-demand presentations in the series.