December 15, 2022
On November 10, 2022, Auvik completed upgrading its new consolidation engine to production. This was an almost two-year-long effort to improve the quality of Auvik’s ability to interpret the information it gathers on different pieces of equipment in each of its tenants, as well as how it takes that information to create a reliable map and automated documentation of its client's networks.
The old consolidation engine was a great innovation for an initial attempt. It allowed Auvik to build information about devices and create maps of networks for its clients. As time went by it became more inefficient with the demands new networks were placing on it. It needed to fully rebuild tenant information when any information at the site level changed. This was not something that would be tenable as Auvik expanded to larger and more diverse networks. It also caused more movement on client maps than was considered reasonable. The old consolidation engine was not suited for handling dynamic IP re-assignments as it kept a permanent mapping of IP to device once one is established. We also found the devices that can “share” an IP address such as high-availability pairs were often mis-consolidated.
Auvik’s new consolidation provides a more accurate and stable result for customers. Additionally it is better able to differentiate high-availability pairs, and hypervisor + IPMI/ILO/iDRAC pairs, giving customers better visibility into their network. The new consolidation engine is more aware of the dynamic nature of IP addresses and reacts to changes in the network, providing more up to date information (DHCP). The new engine improves upon this by better differentiating IP ownership of devices, especially when the IP is re-assigned. In a nutshell, Auvik’s new consolidation engine keeps up well with real time events on customers' network(s). This also allows for Auvik to address issues it finds in days, and even hours as compared to weeks when dealing with the old consolidation engine.
The implementation of this new consolidation engine is one of the steps required to move Auvik away from its required bi-weekly maintenance and toward a full-time, always available platform. It allows Auvik’s support and engineers a much faster response time and deeper understanding of how consolidation issues occurred, leading to faster resolution time.
Auvik will also be offering clients the ability to manually link an IP address to a device in those certain cases where consolidation provides the incorrect answer. For more information on this feature, click here.