Is your Cisco environment proactive or reactive? If you answered proactive, Cisco has a product which is right for you. While I don’t tend to ask this question very often, a question I am frequently asked by students is, “What can CiscoWorks do for them?” CiscoWorks is a product that enables a Cisco environment with more than twenty Cisco devices -- and yes, this includes wireless as well -- to automate many of the tasks we have to do by hand. And speaking of devices, how many devices do you have on your network? If your answer is about thirty -something, you are a candidate for this product. It will tell you the number and type of Cisco devices you have on your network, including what version IOS you are running on all the devices.

Most students look at me and say, are you crazy I can’t tell you that. My response usually is if you had CiscoWorks you could run a report and tell me in about the same time it took me to ask the question. How do you keep a copy of the configuration changes on the routers in the event of a device failure? Well, that one is easy, we tftp the configuration down. The next question typically is, “Well, does that include every time you make a change no matter how small or just occasionally? At this point, I get an inquisitive look such as that does not matter. Well it is possible that small change could mean a huge network outage. So, I would contend it does matter what the change is. Here’s why. What happens if someone goes into the Cisco switch and changes a port to portfast and forgets to turn on the bridge guard. This is an exact case where syslog would have informed CiscoWorks of the problem and immediately backed up the configuration for you automatically. This could be the difference between troubleshooting for twenty minutes or a couple of hours.

In today’s streamlined environments, it is critical that we use tools around us to automate and make our mundane tasks simple. This ultimately frees us up for the more interesting projects or tasks. I have several friends that use multiple tools to automate their Cisco environment. I am amazed at the resourcefulness of an individual to find free tools and try and piece them together to solve the problem. In a majority of cases, these tools offer only a partial solution. It still requires extensive individual attention or custom configuration to get these tools to work together. This is usually too much for a customer to deal with so they are in search of a product that fits this need. CiscoWorks just might be the product to fit the current need. Now ask someone who is knowledgeable with CiscoWorks and which features would be ideal for your environment. With the new products Cisco is releasing and the demand for wireless and VOIP increasing one needs the tools to managed these diverse environments.

CiscoWorks has some of the following features: automated backup of both configurations and IOS’s, ability to manipulate configurations on multiple devices in one single job, graphical view of a device, graphical view of the network layout, troubleshooting tools such as a graphical trace. These are just a few of the features within CiscoWorks. As I travel around, teaching and helping customers in projects, I find that a customer will use the product for just one function when, in fact, it is so critical that they rely upon it for day-to-day survival. One such item is the user-tracking tool within Campus Manager. This product gathers the entire user MAC address tables from the switches, compares that to the ARP tables on the routers to build a table that displays user MAC addresses. Then VLANs are assigned, IP addresses, and, yes, which port the device is located on. Now that is power.

If you have any questions on the power of running a proactive network management environment rather than a reactive network, send an email to jrisler@tampabay.rr.com.