One of the primary roles of a monitoring system is to collect and display data. By data we are talking about bits per second of network traffic, or CPU utilisation of your servers. Data is values that are constantly changing so they are collected, stored, and made available for graphing.
Operational information is information associated with the objects being monitored that isn't data. For network interfaces it may be the MTU, or the admin status, or the vlan. For servers it may be the version of the operating system, or the amount of RAM installed. These values do not change often, but it's very important to know when they do.
While Network Knowledge is collecting data from your equipment, it also collects all the interesting info it can find. It timestamps the info so not only can you look at the current info for an object, you can walk back through history. What was the last configuration of that switch port? When did you upgrade the Linux kernel on that server?
Through the Info Console, we present all that info as a large data source that you can query. Ever wanted to find all network interfaces in a particular vlan? How about all devices that have an IP address on a certain network? Or all your web servers with SSL certificates that'll expire this year? All that info is in there, and we provide the tools for you to access it.
Check out the screen shots below for some examples.
