IP Address Manager tips & tricks

It's been a while since we talked about IPAM so I decided I show you some "backdoor" tips&tricks that can help you fix some minor issues you may run into when using IPAM.

Customizable Payload for ICMP ping request (available in IPAM 2.0.1 and higher)

You may run into a situation where the IPAM scanning seems to work fine and you can see the ICMP traffic but only some of the IP Addresses/devices are monitored in IPAM even if you are expecting that rest of the IP addresses are also in use. One of the frequent cases is typically caused by your firewall which filters ICMP packets bigger than certain a size. In this case you may try to decrease payload size of the ICMP ping request (this was a problem in this case). To do so just add/change the following configuration in "%PROGRAMFILES%\SolarWinds\Orion\IPAM\SolarWinds.IPAM.Jobs.dll.config" configuration file:

  <appSettings>
        <add key="PingSweepDhcpJob.Payload" value="custom payload value"/>
  </appSettings>

The ICMP payload is changed globally so all ICMP packets used for the subnet scans will use the modified value. You also don't need to restart any service after saving your change in configuration file (next ICMP packet will just use the modified value). For those who are interested in more details please open link to Cisco forum.

Remove the limitation of 150 subnets

Have you ever seen this message in your left pane in IPAM: 

If yes then you probably know that the current version of IPAM has a limitation that allows you to display only 150 subnets in left pane by default. If this is your case and you need to see more than 150 subnets then you can use following steps and change this default limitation:

Locate and run this executable application: %PROGRAMFILES%\SolarWinds\Orion\IPAM\SolarWinds.IPAM.InternalSettings.exe.

The item you need to change is named: "Subnet Page, Tree Max Items" - enter the number of subnets you need to see. Then you need to restart the "SolarWinds Orion Module Engine" service.

Initially we introduced this limitation because of the possible negative impact on website performace so you may notice a small slowdown in case of huge number of subnets you want to display.

You may also use this tool for an additional UI changes of IPAM - if you are interested in more details see this and this thwack posts.