One of the elements of 6connect ProVision that lends itself well to integration is the use of existing metadata whenever possible. When dealing with system integration, having a data model with inherent flexibility is key to maintaining efficiencies in your processes as well as ensuring that you aren’t driven crazy with meaningless information.
To that end, we are releasing a beta version of our Observium connector in our 5.1.0 release of ProVision. Observium is an open-source monitoring platform that discovers your network devices and allows you to set various monitoring thresholds for the devices and the services that are running on them.
So why integrate? One of the pieces of Observium that we liked is how it had easy access to both hierarchical resource data in addition to IP address data from network objects.
Currently, with a blank instance of 6connect ProVision, an admin can import the Observium data set into the ProVision Resource Manager.
The current import process grabs the Resource Parent -> VLAN -> Resource Name relationships and imports the hierarchy with associated metadata into the Resource Manager.
The result is a helpful view of your devices tied in with provisioning data (including VLANs, etc.).
But then we figured – why stop there? Wouldn’t it be helpful to have some of the performance and monitoring data inside of ProVision where you are actually taking action on various objects on your network? So we developed a gadget to help take advantage of the data that Observium was gathering and display in a customizable way.
There are some other elements that we intend to implement regarding polling and frequency, but this current release is a good approach to leveraging existing monitoring solutions instead of using “yet another” network discovery system.
Stay tuned for more fun stuff as this feature develops! As always, feedback is welcome and if you have a use case/wishlist item – let us know at salesAT6connect.com.
