Network Atlas is cumbersome, but once maps are built, I found them to be very useful. Keeping up with the changes is challenging because of the lack of automation. One feature I’d like to see is a parent/child relationship between maps and/or have the ability to define map status dependencies so a map status is not dependent upon all items within the map.
I have a parent/master map named WAN that is a map of maps where you have a core network and satellite offices spoking from it. From the WAN map you can click on any individual child map and view the configuration of the clicked on satellite office. The satellite office uses the parent map as one of the elements (I use a cloud to represent it) so that you can easily click on that item to go back to the master map. This allows for drill down and up at will.
I have the above configuration with about 5 levels of sub-mapping. The problem I found was that if any of the satellite offices has a problem, all maps go red/yellow since each is a sub map of the others. For instance, if satellite office 1 goes down, satellite office 2 turns red as if there is a problem on that site.
My suggestion is to create child/parent relationships so that a child can impact its parent, but not other children of that parent.
If not parent/child, we should have the ability to define dependencies of elements in a map. This would give the ability to put a map within a map and explicitly state that the status of the map is not dependent upon the sub maps status. Again, this provides the navigation ability without the negatives previously mentioned. Also, if we want to include a device for informational purposes only, we could add it and the map status could be independent of that one element.
