So, you bought those fancy managed switches but still find yourself running around, hunting down the cause of problems, sometimes without even an idea of where best to start looking? What if someone else could look for you? Better yet, what if someone could watch the network for you 24/7 and alert you of issues as they happen? Herein lies the value of Network Management Software (NMS), and in these videos I will show what makes Hirschmann's Industrial HiVision (IHV) one of the best NMS packages available.
In this first video, IHV discovers all of the managed switches in the network and then "maps" the network topology showing you how all the switches are connected, down to identifying the port numbers.
In the second video, I am demonstrating what IHV shows when one of your connections goes down in the field. In a ring topology such as the one in the video, it is very beneficial to know when this first break occurs as it allows you to investigate and remedy the issue before a second break occurs which would break communication. Without "watching" the network, you are not utilizing the full benefits of a redundant topology. In this clip I demonstrate a myriad of diagnostic and configuration tools made easily accessible through IHV: ping, telnet, switch web interface, trap destination configuration, IP configuration, and system wide diagnostics such as port statuses, firmware versions, etc. IHV is licensed as a server application. Once installing the server application on the machine of choice, there are three different client methods to access the server. One is the standalone installable software client you have been looking at in the previous videos. The second method, shown here is the web client. Simply open a browser on any machine on the network, point it to the server and you have the fully functional web client. You don't have to install anything extra to access the software from any machine with a web browser! Also, there are no licensing restrictions on the number of client connections to the server. The third client method is an Active-X client. I demonstrate the Active-X client here in a web browser; but the more practical application is dropping this Active-X object into your HMI. Create a blank new graphic, drop in this Active-X object, point it to the server, and your "Network Monitoring" graphic development is complete in a matter of minutes! I think the features of Industrial HiVision are outstanding, and we're just getting started. You might have noticed the title of this post ended with "Part 1." I plan to cover additional features which are perhaps even more impressive in a future post.
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