Editing Site Properties in Nectus

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Edit Site Properties

You can easily edit the properties of any existing Site. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to edit the properties of an existing Site. We’ll also discuss the functions of each editable property.

Opening the Edit Site Properties Dialog Box

It takes just a few clicks to open the Edit Site Properties dialog box for any existing Site. Follow these instructions:

  1. Click Sites in the Sites Panel on the Nectus Home Screen. The “All Sites” list appears.
  2. Open the All Sites list by clicking the plus sign ( + ) to the left of the list.
  3. Navigate to the Site you want to edit and right-click it.

  1. In the menu that appears, select Properties. The Edit Site Properties dialog box appears.

  1. Make your desired edits (details about each editable property follow). Click Ok when done.

Editable Properties

You can edit the following properties from the Edit Site Properties dialog box. Here is a complete explanation of each field:

  • Site Gateways Button: Opens the Site Gateways dialog box and displays all the potential gateway Devices for this Site.
  • Site Level Name: A unique identifier for the Site Level. You can assign any name you wish.
  • Site Specific Hostname Prefix: Setting a hostname prefix here will automatically assign to this Site any unassigned Devices with the same prefix. This feature is currently disabled.
  • Site Color: The color to use for Devices that are assigned to this Site. Click the colored block to select a color, or enter the ASCII color name.
  • Outage Map Icon: A clickable list of icons that can be used to identify this Site. The options are Circle, Triangle, or Star.
  • Outage Map Icon Size: Allows you to adjust the size of the icon that represents this Site. Typically used to make the icons for more important Sites larger.
  • Address: The street address of the Site. Can be used to generate the GPS Latitude and Longitude of the Site.
  • Find GPS from Address Button: When you click this button, Nectus uses Google Maps to find the GPS Latitude and Longitude of the Site.
  • GPS Latitude: The Latitude of the Site. You can enter a value manually, or let Nectus populate this field using the “Find GPS from Address” button.
  • GPS Longitude: The Longitude of the Site. You can enter a value manually, or let Nectus populate this field using the “Find GPS from Address” button.
  • Maintenance Window: Shows the time frame when Site administration is allowed. Click to select from a list of available maintenance windows. These windows are defined at Settings / General Settings / Scheduled Maintenance Settings.

 

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Aruba Wireless Dashboard added to Nectus 1.2.30

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Support for monitoring Aruba wireless controllers was added to most recent release of Nectus NMS.  It brings visibility to most loaded wireless APs, SSIDs and controllers.

It displays basic antenna info, current AP channels, gives list of rogue APs and rogue clients and allows generation of Wireless HeatMaps over floorplans.

 

 

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Cisco Wireless Dashboards

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After support for wireless devices was added in Nectus, specific monitoring dashboards were created to track any change that can affect the wireless users, controllers or access points.
The wireless dashboards are vendor specific and this is where you can find the dashboard for Cisco wireless devices:

The focus of this article is on Cisco wireless devices, this is how the Cisco wireless dashboard looks like:

Wireless dashboard has multiple sections.
One of the sections covers the controllers and can provide information about the CPU usage, how many APs are Up, Down or Downloading:

As always, you can get device details by selecting the controller:

The interesting things starts when you select the counters related to the number of APs that are up, down or in process of being associated with the controller.
You get a list of APs in that state associated with that specific controller:

To get details about an AP, it is enough to select one of the APs and a window with multiple tabs will provide various information that can help the operator to understand how that specific AP operates.
The first tab provides the name of AP assigned by the operator, the model of AP, the operating system, the IP address and some other useful information about the AP.

The next tab provides technical information about the two frequencies in which the AP operates:

In the next tab, quality of service settings are covered:

The forth tab is about the load in terms of number of clients, receive and transmit utilization for the frequencies supported:

The next tab shows the rogue APs detected:

You can also see the neighbor APs and some of their characteristics:

And the last tab shows the CDP neighbor:

Another section of the wireless dashboard is the SSID Client load which shows how many clients are on each SSID:

The wireless dashboard allows to see how many clients and on which frequency each AP has:

And the last section of the wireless dashboard is the one showing how many clients are on the two frequencies, 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz, in total and you can see some history of how many clients were at some point in time.

Nectus Cisco Wireless dashboard can provide useful information about the wireless devices, controllers and access points.

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Cisco Wireless client search and tracking tools

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In this post we will cover some new functionality added to Nectus in latest Wireless release.

The “Wireless Client Search” allows the operator to find any wireless client by its MAC, IP address or Username.

The client search is located under main menu “Tools”:

In the menu, you have an option to search for a client based on the MAC, IP or Username. You can also restrict the scope where the search will take place:

Here is how a result of a MAC search looks like. You can search using part of a MAC address as well, but you need to provide at least 3 characters (two numbers and “:” )

You can view the client details by clicking either on MAC address or IP address and the new window will show Client’s basic info like like SSID, RSSI etc.:

The second tab will show the RSSI from various APs that detects client’s signal:

If AP name is clicked, then you will get detailed information about the AP:

Next, you can search for an IP address (again, you do not have to specify full IP address):

The last option is to search using an username:

The username is shown in the client detailed information:

Coming back to the search window, there is the possibility to track a client. You actually track the MAC address of the client to see if and where the client roamed across the wireless network. One or more clients can be tracked in the same time:

You need to specify how often Nectus should check this MAC address and for how long. If you know the client goes on and off often or it moves around the wireless network, then you might want to use an aggressive timer for frequency to get accurate data about availability:

The list of the tracked clients can be seen here:

And the list is this:

A client can be added for tracking from this menu as well:

And here is how the tracking information looks like for a client:

This shows that the client did not move to another AP, so there was no or little movement of the client.

 

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Cisco Wireless Heat Maps

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In this post, we will cover the wireless heat maps and how they are created in Nectus.

A heat map will allow to visualize the state of the wireless coverage and help to take decision in order to improve the coverage.

Using the information from APs along with a map of physical location, you can find out where are the hot and cold spots.

A heat map is a L2 topology diagram where you can add access points and optionally the controller to which the access points are associated with.

You can add the controller and the APs from the list of controllers:

If the controller and several APs are added to the topology, it will look like this:

In the topology toolbar settings option, you must check the option to see access points in the topology:

Afterwards, the topology looks like this:

You can see which channel is used on each AP and how many clients are connected to each AP.

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Wireless Heat Map Vizualization added to Nectus starting from build 1.2.24

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Nectus goes wireless. Starting from version 1.2.24  we added support for Cisco Wireless.

Powerful dashboards and RSSI heatmaps now available to all Nectus customers.    Download your copy of Nectus

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Which US city uses the most IPv4 public addresses?

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Note: Information is based on Nectus IP geo-location service

State City IPv4 Addresses
Ohio Columbus 225326103
California Los Angeles 54776440
Arizona Fort Huachuca 54644594
Texas Houston 42689210
District of Columbia Washington 32721834
New York New York City 31867103
Virginia Ashburn 31828300
Indiana Indianapolis 26421929
Georgia Atlanta 25527566
California Palo Alto 25105708
Washington Redmond 24885468
Michigan Dearborn 23705811
North Carolina Durham 21588969
New Jersey Newark 21491795
California San Diego 21485402
Illinois Chicago 20074587
North Carolina Raleigh 18955414
New Jersey Bedminster 17843408
Texas Richardson 17241943
Texas Dallas 16869204
Massachusetts Cambridge 15868348
California San Jose 15336783
Washington Seattle 15260827
Alabama Montgomery 14906638
California Cupertino 13954110
Washington Bellevue 13800919
Connecticut Fairfield 13507953
California San Francisco 12561267
Pennsylvania Philadelphia 12464449
Virginia Reston 11731922
Florida Lake Mary 10572081
New Jersey Mount Laurel 10087552
Colorado Denver 9869523
Missouri Saint Louis 9426794
California Norwalk 9273764
Virginia Virginia Beach 9107341
Michigan Ann Arbor 8772940
California Mountain View 8474238
Connecticut Middletown 8241397
Texas San Antonio 7877211
Texas Austin 7734993
Arizona Phoenix 7649529
Oregon Portland 7600141
New Jersey Rahway 7312241
Florida Miami 6713810
Ohio Cincinnati 6688810
California Concord 6607183
Virginia Dulles 6470388
Missouri Town and Country 5898488
Massachusetts Boston 5557232
Louisiana Monroe 5300043
Colorado Greenwood Village 5070591
Pennsylvania Pittsburgh 4780729
Missouri Kansas City 4578123
Virginia Herndon 4492530
Michigan Detroit 4336217
Pennsylvania Doylestown 4203957
North Carolina Charlotte 4085710
Tennessee Nashville 3916537
Georgia Duluth 3805720
Nevada Las Vegas 3792683
Illinois Naperville 3716723
Florida Orlando 3665033
California Sacramento 3601243
Utah Salt Lake City 3592200
Alabama Redstone Arsenal 3428226
Minnesota Minneapolis 3412363
Florida Tampa 3400441
New Jersey Morristown 3304100
California Santa Clara 3252933
New York Rochester 3189712
Maryland Baltimore 3079657
Minnesota Saint Paul 3019512
Arizona Kingman 2983075
Massachusetts Springfield 2927039
Wisconsin Milwaukee 2811053
Colorado Fort Collins 2752782
Wisconsin Madison 2732615
California Belmont 2725536
Texas Plano 2671935
Virginia Arlington 2668836
Connecticut Stamford 2609471
Ohio Cleveland 2600011
Kansas Overland Park 2528866
Texas Irving 2512563
Kentucky Richmond 2509411
Texas Fort Worth 2494944
Arkansas Little Rock 2446145
Florida Jacksonville 2423627
Missouri Columbia 2266295
Oregon Beaverton 2224613
New York Buffalo 2210272
California San Ramon 2131203
Ohio Akron 2098568
California Pleasanton 2097585
Maryland Rockville 2072266
California San Mateo 2044008
Nebraska Omaha 2020147
New York Albany 2018827
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Next Generation of Network Discovery and Monitoring Tools.. and NetFlow

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Next Generation of Network Discovery and Monitoring Tools

There are many reasons why your network needs to be monitored. It is essential to any network administrator to keep track of the network’s performance and usage in real time and to detect failures, slowness or any other threat that could be affecting the network. Every device that is added to the network, every change in the topology or any failure needs to be immediately detected. That is why we need a network monitoring software to make the best of our network and that is exactly what Nectus is for.

Nectus is a network discovery, monitoring and visualization software and its main role is to discover network topology, generate a visual network diagram and keep it up to date, detecting any failure or unusual behavior that could be affecting the network and alerting the network administrator immediately.

These are the Nectus key features:

  • Automatically discovers connections between devices (via Cisco Discovery Protocol) and stores all this connections in a Database.
  • Network discovery is run everyday and if any new device has been added to the network, the topology is updated automatically so network diagrams will always be up to date, no need to do it yourself so you will be saving your time. You can generate L2 and L3 network topology in just one click, way better than Microsoft Visio!
  • Real time monitoring is overlaid on top of network diagrams. You will be able to see utilization, errors and dropped packets or up/down status directly on your diagrams.
  • Automated configuration backup and configuration changes for routers and switches along with best practice audits so you can find and fix misconfigured devices.
  • Includes free integrated NetFlow collector.
  • Syslog Server: Store unlimited number of Syslog messages.
  • URL Monitoring: Monitor UP/DOWN and latency for any URL.
  • Track configuration differences. Easily find differences in configurations before and after the change.
  • Layer 3 Traffic Path Visualization: See how packets travel from A to B.

If you are looking for a software to keep your network in a best shape, then Nectus is your best choice!

You can download a 60 days fully functional demo at https://nectus5.com/download/ and try all these features yourself.

 

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The best network management software just got better.. IPAM

We will be adding IPAM (IP Address Management) module to the Nectus NMS starting from January 2018.

No special licensing will be required and it will be immediately available to all current Nectus users free of charge.

Support for  IPv4 and IPv6 address space management, API interface for third party integration and many more cool features ..

Download Nectus

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Manage all Telco circuits and circuit contracts with Nectus CircuitDB

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We are proud to announce that our next Nectus release will include the most powerful and feature rich telco circuit management platform available on the market today.

Nectus CircuitDB provides a central repository of all of your circuit contracts and provide reminders well before contract expiration times so you can renegotiate better prices with your telco provider.

Circuit DB is fully integrated with Nectus Network Discovery and Monitoring module which allows you to map Circuit ID directly to specific router interface and get real time visibility of  circuit UP/DOWN status.

Nectus can send email alerts directly to telco support in case of specific circuit is Down or automatically open support cases on telco portals ( with selected number of telco providers).

Nectus CircuitDB can calculate circuit UP time based on Monitoring statistics provided by core Nectus NMS to verify contracted SLAs.

Combined with automatic Network Topology generation that shows where specific circuit is located Nectus CircuitDB is a core tool for all network engineers and procurement experts.

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Nectus Feature List ( Build 1.2.16)

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Here is the most complete list of features available for Nectus customers

FeatureComments
Network Monitoring ICMP, SNMP v2c and v3
Network Discovery1200+ platforms
Netflow CollectorSupport for v5, v9, IPFIX Netflow
Command ScriptingAutomate Config changes to routers and switches
Configuration BackupConfiguration backup for routers and switches
Basic Server MonitoringSNMP and WMI
SQL Server Monitorng50+ SQL related metrics
Network Topology VisualizationAutomatic L2 and L3 topology generation
Syslog Server Store unlimited number of Syslog messages
SNMP TrapsProcess incoming SNMP traps
GSM based alertingReceive Alert notifications directly to your cell phone
Email based alertingReceive Alert notifications directly to email
URL MonitoringMonitor UP/DOWN and latency for any URL
Configuration DiffsEasily find differences in configs before and after the change
L3 Traffic Path VisualizationSee how packet travels from A to B
MAC Address searchEasily find MAC address in your network
Web based SNMP Walk Utility
Web based Ping plotter Up to 10 IP Addresses
Web based SSH clientSSH to any device from your browser
LDAP Integration
Custom Dashboards
SmartNet verification for any device
Multiple SNMP profilesSupport for different SNMP parameters

 

 

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Free Nectus license for Cisco Academy Students

We offer free Nectus license to all Students of Cisco Network Academies. All Features Enabled.

Restricted to max 20 devices.

Contact us at admin@nectus5.com to get your personal licence key.

 

 

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CST signs partner agreement with Cisco Learning Academy to provide Network Visualization and Discovery tools

CST signs partner agreement with Cisco Learning Academy to provide

Network Visualization and Discovery tools to be used in training classes.

 

 

 

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Netflow collector functionality added to Nectus starting from version 1.2.8

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Netflow collector functionality added to Nectus starting from version 1.2.8

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