NT Apps Help Needed

[mccor]

hi all,
Would someone please shed some light as to how I should go about
carrying out the following task.
The task is:
I want to gather network failure reports from my employer(a telco company)
and make them available in the company's intranet so that it may be acessed by senior managers, network operational staff and some engineers through their web browsers.

The networks include; SDH, PDH, PSTN switches and various Data switching nodes,satellite links -both international and domestic, low capacity radio channels to name a few.
The report would contain these info besides others.
* When the failure occured
* Nature of problem.
* What region and customers are affected as a result.
* What needs to be done and who is currently attending to it.
* If fault is cleared, by whom and at what time.

Currently the reports (learnt from network monitoring alarms etc)are manually entered into a simple data base(what kind of data base (db), iam not sure). They're then faxed to various managers and engineers-about 15 in all.This, as can be seen is time consuming, tedious and consumes alot of papers.

Iam a Data communications specialist and am not much into data base development and stuff.
However,i have experience using Wins NT4, some basics of MS IIS and web site development.I already have a Win NT4 server with IIS.3.

What shall I do first, how and what other things do I need?
Your generous advice/assistance will be greatly appreciated.



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mccor

[spaceAlien]

> I want to gather network failure reports from my employer
> (a telco company) and make them available in the company's intranet
> so that it may be acessed by senior managers, network operational
> staff and some engineers through their web browsers.

Companies like Oracle and SAP have made multi-billion dollar businesses out of this sort of thing. I assume that your company does not want to spend several million dollars to out-source.


> a simple data base(what kind of data base (db), iam not sure).

I assume there is another person responsible for collecting, analyzing and distributing this information. THIS IS YOUR CUSTOMER. This is the person who must support you in your task. Not only to fight for resources, but also to define requirements.


> This, as can be seen is time consuming, tedious and consumes a
> lot of papers.

Economies of scale -- an intranet *CAN* be more efficient, but only when the scale of the task becomes large enough.


> I am a Data communications specialist and am not much into data
> base development and stuff.

Make sure your supervisor understands that operating a corporate intranet *WILL* consume some portion of your time on a permanent basis.


> I already have a Win NT4 server with IIS.3.

Make sure your server has the necessary capability, then I would recommend upgrading to IIS 4 -- should be on one of the service packs. MS Office (Access) 2000 can do this -- how well do you know MS Access?

Cheers --

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ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US

[Ghost_Hacker]

I would look at some products put out by OSI software. Their PI software may be what you want. Some Telcos,ISPs and other Manufactures use their software to track and store information on "Plant" processes. There are a few other companies that produce software for trend,alarm, and historical collection, some of which can be intergrated with a web server for reporting to "managers".


Good Luck http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/smile.gif

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"It's just a whisper in my Ghost"

[mccor]

Thanks
Yes, economising! if there's a way we can do this at reasonable cost
to produce an efficient reporting process, I would like to explore that.

* The status reports of all our network elements are collected by
ourselves. No other party is involved here.
* My section has been approached to see if we could do this some other way by the other section responsible for collecting the failure reports.
To this end, iam exploring for ways.

* Thanks, I'll have to install a SP that has IIS 4 or higher.
* Iam a newbie on MS Access, so I'll have to start learning it.
Thank you again




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mccor

[spaceAlien]

Scenario 1: Data is in MS Access -- Things are relatively simple. Whoever is managing the data can publish to the Web server. You will need to setup ODBC and configure server.

Scenario 2: Data is in ODBC compliant database -- You need to get down and dirty with ASP, VBScript, SQL and HTML. This will be a lot of work and a steep learning curve.

Scenario 3: Data does not require RDBMS, can be done with spreadsheet -- life just got much simpler.

Scenario 4: Someone expects you to design, create and manage a distributed database application -- you don't want to go there.



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MOVE 'ZIG' FOR GREAT JUSTICE

[mccor]

Thanks alot
I 'll dive to their site and see which s/w would be applicable to my
case.



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mccor

[mccor]

Thank you heaps for that excellent piece of advice.
I'll have to get down and start assessing which of those scenarios
would be ideal for my case.
Once again, thank you for those invaluable info.




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mccor