EPICenter Concepts and Solutions Guide
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4 Configuring and Monitoring Your Network
This chapter describes how EPICenter can help you configure, monitor, and manage the components of
your network on a network-wide basis. Topics include:
● Configuring multiple devices concurrently using user-defined Telnet macros
● Network-wide configuration of VLANs
● Monitoring network configuration through graphical and HTML-based displays
● Monitoring and verifying the status of EAPS protocol configurations (EAPS domains)
Scalable, Concurrent Multidevice Configuration
In a large network, the burden of configuring, monitoring and managing your network devices one-by-
one can become overwhelming, especially when a global configuration change needs to be made across
a large sets of devices (creating a new network-wide VLAN, for example, or globally enabling or
disabling certain functionality). EPICenter provides several ways to accomplish scalable, concurrent
configuration of multiple devices.
An important feature of EPICenter is its support of Telnet macros, which provide a way to make
configuration changes on multiple devices concurrently with minimal administrator intervention.
Through the EPICenter Telnet applet, you can create your own Telnet macros to perform device
configuration actions, and then have EPICenter run those macros on multiple devices. Due to multi-
threading EPICenter can execute a macro on multiple devices concurrently, significantly reducing the
time it takes to implement a configuration change across many devices.
Telnet macros are also useful for automating standard configuration tasks that can be executed in the
same way over and over as needed. For example, when new devices are added to the network, a macro
can be run on the new device to implement the configurations that are standard across all devices on
the network, or that are standard to devices of a certain type.
Once a macro has been created, it can be scoped so that it can be run on a device (or all the devices in a
device group) without requiring access to the Telnet applet itself. This allows an EPICenter
administrator to restrict access to EPICenter’s Telnet applet (and thus direct Telnet access to a switch) to
a select group of users, while still allowing a larger set of EPICenter users to perform pre-defined switch
configuration tasks. This means that an administrator can abstract some of the common CLI commands,
and give non-administrator users controlled access to a subset of the CLI without enabling access to the
entire spectrum of CLI capabilities.
User-Defined Telnet Macros
The Telnet applet provides both a Macro Editor and a Macro Player function, in addition to allowing
interactive Telnet access to individual devices. Telnet macros can be created in either the Macro Player
or the Macro Editor. You use the Macro Editor to create and save macros that are intended to be re-
used.
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