Presenting Performance Data to the Consumer

A network manager spends some of the time making presentations about network performance and isn’t always in a position to present the data online. NNM performance data needs to be captured and repurposed for offline meetings.

Assuming that NNM historical performance data is available, a few simple screenshots could suffice. (See “Taking Screenshots of Maps” on page88.) Note that the standard xnmgraph window background is black, which lets the other line colors stand out clearly. The background color is controlled by an X-Window resource located in the $APP_DEFS/XNmgraph resource file. The resulting file should be transferred from the UNIX NNM system to the authoring workstation in binary format.

Should textually formatted performance data be preferred, xnmgraph may be used to save the displayed data in a text file. While UNIX does not require or recognize file name extensions, it may be appropriate to append the.txt extension for the benefit of challenged authoring workstations that do need them. Transfer the text file in ASCII format from the NNM system to the authoring workstation. The columnar textual data is usually imported into a spreadsheet or word processor to reformat it for presentation purposes.

The snmpColDump utility may also be used to save specific SNMP performance data into a text file.