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Network Documentation for Asset Tracking - Army Corps of Engineers

With more than 1,400 employees scattered across six states, the Baltimore District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) is responsible for military construction and civil works projects in Maryland, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Delaware, parts of New York and Virginia, and the District of Columbia. Despite the massive IT infrastructure that supports USACE operations, the IS staff had no easy way to track assets, plan IT budgets, do system-wide troubleshooting or get a handle on district IT data. MIS planners for the Corps recognized the need for a tool that would gather information from different sources, maintain it in a single repository and graphically portray it. The answer - netViz.

According to Jim Bard, the IT Planner for the Baltimore District; "within the six districts of the North Atlantic Division (NAD)of the Army Corps of Engineers, each with its own IT infrastructure, we decided early on that we needed a tool that could show us a variety of data, was easy to use, and would force consistency so that everyone in the organization used the same diagramming conventions. By standardizing on netViz, we've been able to see all of our network data in a single view that we can query depending on our needs."

Keeping track of hardware assets

The primary and obvious application for netViz is troubleshooting. But Bard was impressed with netViz's flexibility, which makes it useful for a variety of USACE functions, such as asset tracking. "The Baltimore District has a 'trade-down' policy for IT equipment," explains Bard. "We categorize our PC users by job function - high, medium and low. For example, engineers using CADD programs are high-end users while secretaries who solely do word processing are classified as low-end users. We only buy 'high-end' PCs. So, if a secretary's computer needs replacement, we'll look for an outdated high-end machine and swap it out to a mid-level user, whose PC in turn is given to the secretary. A single computer going down may result in a three-way swap with personnel in three physical different locations. This means that we constantly need to know who's got what equipment, and we need to be able to quickly locate equipment that meets our search criteria. By embedding user information in our netViz graphics, we can do a search right from our netViz diagrams to find the best candidates for trade downs."

Using asset information to meet a variety of needs

netViz has the ability to embed graphics with any user-defined data. As Bard pointed out, "With netViz, we can create objects with just the data fields we need. This makes it easy for us to set up our diagrams with precisely the information we track. For example, when we're preparing our annual budgets and need to decide how many computers will need to be upgraded or replaced, we can query our netViz diagrams to see how many 486s we have or how many computers have insufficient RAM to run the software we're likely to be installing in the next fiscal year. We've even found the netViz database to be useful in some unexpected ways. For example, we're using our netViz diagrams to print out an employee telephone directory because we realized that our netViz project had the most up-to-date information about our employees' locations."

"And by linking our netViz diagrams to an SMS database," said Bard, "we're also able to track software licenses. This will prove to be invaluable to our IS staff. With 900 employees in our District Headquarters, tracking software manually was nearly impossible. Now that our netViz diagrams are reading the database generated by SMS, we can just query netViz directly and get a report showing who has what licenses for specified applications. This same procedure will also soon be applied to the 400+ units at field sites."

By standardizing on netViz and using the same graphics library of devices district wide, anyone in the IT department can instantly get a handle on the district's IT information. Said Bard, "we have seven different major locations within NAD. By creating a standard object catalog with just the objects and data fields we

need, we've been able to have geographically distant IT administrators create different diagrams and publish them to our Intranet. An administrator in NAD's New York Headquarters could pull up the diagrams, put them together and instantly get a handle on our district-wide IT configuration information. netViz has allowed us to create truly 'distributed' documentation that saves USACE a lot of time and money."