What the Network Health Monitor Adds to IntraVUE

Transcript

If you use IntraVUE, you already have the hard part solved. Every device on your plant network discovered, connected, and drawn on a live map. The Network Health Monitor picks up where that map leaves off.

Everything starts with the network, the switches and devices on your plant floor. IntraVUE works by scanning that network, collecting data from every device it finds, and calculating the network topology. It stores everything it collects in its own database. When a user wants to look at their network, they open a browser; the browser calls the IntraVUE API, which reads the database and presents the information.

The Network Health Monitor works alongside IntraVUE. It uses the same IntraVUE API and some other code to pull data from the IntraVUE database. As that data comes in, the Network Health Monitor runs real-time analysis on it, deciding what matters and raising alarms and warnings if needed. The results go into the Network Health Monitor extended database and sometimes an email. The Network Health Monitor continues analysis, looking for issues. The Network Health Monitor user sees all of it in the same way as IntraVUE: a browser calling the Network Health Monitor API, which delivers the information from the databases.

Every event is analyzed against more than twenty potential alarms and warnings. A duplicate IP address. A critical always-on device dropping offline. A PROFINET or EtherNet/IP device which changes model or version. A link that is quietly degrading.

You do not have to catch these yourself, and you do not have to be an IntraVUE expert to recognize them. The Network Health Monitor finds them for you and brings them to your attention. Every one of them lands in the alarm panel. The Network Health Monitor emails you the alarms when something needs your attention. You do not have to be sitting in front of the screen to find out.

The topology map starts with a network you already recognize and then adds views IntraVUE does not have. Beyond the main map, there is a map of devices that keep disconnecting, a map that shows you where ping problems are, and a map of receive and transmit showing you bytes moved and bandwidth used. There is even a map to show where any CRC or IfInErrors are happening. Same devices, to answer a completely different question each time.

Then there is the Plant View: your own plant drawing, with monitored devices sitting where they physically are on the floor. If you have used IntraVUE's plant drawing, you know that it is a raster image. Zoom in past a certain point, and it turns pixelated. The Network Health Monitor Plant View is built on vector graphics instead. Zoom in as far as you want, from the whole site down to a single panel, and the drawing stays crisp.

You are not limited to one. Configure as many Plant View maps as you need, with live devices painted on each one. For instance, if your plant is on several different floors or contains other buildings.

The Network Health Monitor also tracks the health of every VLAN you have configured. Each network is color coded, and the worst-case VLAN's color dominates the main display. So one look tells you whether anything in your network needs your attention. And when something does, finding the cause is easy. You go straight from the color to the alarms, the disconnects, and the events behind it, instead of hunting for what changed.

When something does go wrong, or you need an analysis, or to hand the state of the network to somebody else, two buttons on the Status display generate PDF reports on demand, from current data.

The Network Health Monitor Status Report is the health of your network as the Network Health Monitor sees it right now, based on collected and analyzed data. The IntraVUE PDF report is the classic IntraVUE report, which also shows a list of all the devices in each network. The IntraVUE Analysis Report is a full analysis of your IntraVUE database, including device lists, generated on the spot. Both are real reports you can send to a manager, a vendor, or anyone else. It is also very useful for analyzing your network while you start to figure out what is wrong.

And there is more in the Network Health Monitor than one short video can cover. The Reports menu alone includes an Uptime Report, a Connection History Report, a One Week Disconnections Report, along with minute-by-minute views of disconnections and ping failures. The Utilities menu adds tools like Quick Check, exposing the most common configuration issues, a Device Editor, tools for setting and managing critical device states, and more.

That is the Network Health Monitor. Your IntraVUE data stored, analyzed, mapped, and reported on, without changing anything about the way IntraVUE runs today.