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Stretching northeast of Sacramento from the city of Roseville to Lake Tahoe, Placer County has some of the prettiest scenery in California. But it's also one of the fastest growing counties in the State, with a population of over 200,000. The county has more than twenty-six administrative departments that provide hundreds of services ranging from education and law enforcement to public works. With increasing demands related to managing and troubleshooting the county's massive IT infrastructure, MIS analysts realized that they needed a user-friendly, centralized repository of IT data. Placer County's answer - netViz.

The Challenge - a widely-dispersed IT structure

According to Linda Carlisle, a Placer County Network Systems Analyst II, "because our county is so large, we have facilities that are quite far apart. We have one central management/help-desk office, and it just wasn't feasible to send a technician to a distant site every time a user had a problem. We decided early on that we needed a tool that could graphically depict all of our network information and allow us to perform basic diagnostic and service functions from our main office," says Carlisle.

The Solution - netViz

After investigating alternatives, the county settled on netViz. "We were impressed with netViz's ability to depict complex hierarchies and launch directly from diagram objects to other applications," says Carlisle.

Almost all of the county's servers are in a single location. MIS personnel started their documentation project by creating netViz diagrams of the facility's servers and then went on to diagram the equipment at the distant sites. Using netViz's Launch feature, the project was configured so that users can initiate a variety of functions when a user right clicks on a diagram device. "Say a user calls us to say he or she can't get on the network," explained Carlisle. "As part of our troubleshooting process, we can open our netViz project and drill down to the network component that we suspect is causing the problem. First we "ping" the component directly from netViz to see if it's live. If appropriate, we can then telnet to the equipment from our netViz screen to gather pertinent statistics and adjust the configuration, if necessary. We've also set up our diagrams so that by right clicking a device we can launch directly to information about the component. For our servers, that usually means a Word document. For routers it's often an HTML file. We've also associated each netViz object with a text file containing comprehensive device-configuration information. This allows our netViz diagrams themselves to form the basis of our disaster-recovery database. Being able to graphically see our network from the macro to the micro view and then launch diagnostic tools and read support materials right from our netViz project provides an enormous benefit. Using netViz saves us time and money by freeing up our support personnel and helping to minimize our down time."

Drilling down from the macro view to the micro view

Sometimes, MIS department technicians do have to visit distant sites. This created another problem. Given the turnover rate for IT support staff, there was very limited institutional knowledge about the nuts and bolts of each site's network infrastructure. "If a technician was on an unfamiliar campus, he or she could spend a lot of time just finding the right wiring closet,

let alone getting a handle on the specific problem that needed to be addressed," said Carlisle. The solution - netViz's drill-down capability. Said Carlisle, "we've made it easy for technicians to perform off-site service when necessary. The top level of our netViz project shows a map of the county with each IT site designated graphically. By double clicking on a site, a technician can drill down to see a detailed street map of the facility's campus. This gets the technician to the right building. A double click on a building on the campus map drills down to a photograph of that building. By continuing to double click, the technician can drill into a wing, floorplan and wiring closet. We've even set up some of our closet diagrams to launch a video clip of the closet so that the technician can get a realistic view of how the components are laid out in the racks."

And the county hasn't stopped there. By linking netViz objects to an Access database with procurement information, budget personnel can create financial reports directly from their netViz diagrams. "For example," explained Carlisle, "we can go to our netViz project, do a search for all of the equipment that will have to be replaced in the year 2000 and see what the cost will be. This inventory information will be a great help to management when it's time to plan our budget."

"Our telecommunications department is also using netViz," said Carlisle, "and we plan to document the Sheriff Department's radio network. Having all of our network information in a single repository will allow us to streamline our operations and keep our system up and running.