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Toolset Wish List - Top 5 Enhancements

chris.lapoint

Please post your Top 5 requests for enhancement (including new tool ideas) in this thread.

Thanks in advance for your help!

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jonchill

My 3 enhancements would be:-

The ability to run certain tools as services ie the IP address management tool etc

Greater integration with Orion ie again the IP address management being able t be viewed in Orion, I know this is being worked on by Chris at ASL but it would be useful to do this with other tools

Web frontends for subnet calculator, ping sweep and traceroute tools so they can be run from within Orion if they are installed on the Orion box

Jon

IT Infrastructure Manager
Pilgrim Hospital
UK

mpaquette

I just started using the toolset this week. One area I see for improvement is the IP Management tool. This needs to be able to run at any time with no user logged in. Run it as a service.

brhunt

My biggest need to to be able to specify which port that Network Performance Monitor uses to interogate network devices via SNMP. I would like to be able to specify 3 devices for example, device1 on port 161, device2 on 162 and device3 on 163. This would allow me to monitor multiple devices behind a firewall using one external address. The firewall would remap the ports to the appropriate internal device, changing the target port back to 161.

Thanks.

Bryan Hunt

mailto: bryan.hunt@ccnwo.com

vbowers

Run as a service... HUGE. It is so frustrating to be running Orion in a web page, click on one of my tool icons and have it puke because I'm not logged into the base server but am running it from my laptop. Yeah, I can fire up Remote Desktop, THEN launch my Orion web page and THEN the tools work, but what a pain in the keister!

How about PATHPING support? Yeah, Win only, but a nice tool. Wouldn't be hard to roll your own to include multi-platform support if ya want.

jonchill

Doesn't the traceroute that comes with engineers do the same thing as pathping, it continually pings it hop and gives any packet loss.

Jon

IT Infrastructure Manager
Pilgrim Hospital
UK

chris.lapoint

vbowers,

Just to clarify your last post regarding Toolset being available from Orion web pages. Do you only have the Toolset installed on the Orion server?

The reason I ask is that if Toolset is installed locally on the laptop you are viewing the Orion web page from, you should be able to launch your local Toolset applications using the right-click controls.

If this scenario isn't working, I'd like to open a bug.

Thanks,

-Chris

______________________
Chris LaPoint
Sr. Product Manager, Toolset
SolarWinds

Lertsa

Too late to ask for the automated compacting to work in NPM since I already bought the PME... but it would be greatly appreciated by anyone who hasn't bought it yet.

Enchancements I would like to see in the future:

- Automated XML snapshots from Network Monitor (would give something to show to the people in the Helpdesk so they know what to tell on the phone...)
- At least NPM, NM and Address Management should run as a service
- More integrated device management. Devices should be listed on one list from which they could be picked to various applications such as NM, NPM so they don't have to be added one by one to each application.
- Network monitor global settings, so that every node can be configured simultaneously

vandie

Add SQL Server support to network monitor, the 2 gig limit is not enough.

Vandie Williamson

SW4141

1) Run as a service
2) Command Line settings / switches
3) Greater integration with Orion
4) Orion "hooks" on the tools to run as with web interface

cnorborg

Gads, I know there is lots of stuff I'd like to see changed, but to remember them all now.. Lets see.

First, Cisco 3750 switch support, specifically when the switches are stacked via Stackwise. Esp. in Switch Port Mapper.

More centralized configuration. ie: If you put a community string into one app, it should be in another. The ability to specify a telnet app that every tool will use. Consistancy in this too...

Better integration with other apps, like Excel. Specifically things like in "IP Network Browser" - you should be able to multiselect right from the main window and paste into an application, but that doesn't work. Instead you export into a file and get a mess that is difficult to work with. Whatever happened to a delimited file that you can load in Excel or a perl script?

Man, I'd love to be able to scan a subnet, and have it produce an "inventory" report, with the IP address, DNS name, internal name (sysname?) and serial #. (and easily export into Excel!!)

More consistant UI between apps. They still feel a bit like a group of separate tools...

Craig Norborg
Network Analyst
Robert Bosch Corporation

boblon

We just got our new EE Toolset version in. I have looked through the docs.

I have ALWAYS wanted the ability to use the tools via a scripting language or batch file, including the ability to pass parameters to the tool and collect the output.

I was told that it was possible even with the old set but could never get any help on describing how it was to be accomplished.

Any chance with this set?

Bob Loniewski
KSC, Florida

Krislee

Hi there,

The ability to exclude a port(s) when using Switch Port Mapper would be useful.

Also, give the Cisco Config uploader the ability to save the new config to NVRAM. The documentation says it does but your dev guys say it doesn't!

Remove the 2GB limit for NPM. Probably a moot point now the PME is available.

Cheers,

Kris.

Junyoure

How about a Tab in the Subnet calculator for wild-card masking and free-form mask calculations? I'm having to isolate addresses more and more for security concerns across discontiguous subnets. it would be nice to be able to enter, say: 10.32.0.11 with a mask of 255.224.0.15 and have it tell me what IP addresses match that network. Obviously, it's for ACL work.

-jr.

Network_Guru

How about a Tab in the Subnet calculator for wild-card masking and free-form mask calculations? I'm having to isolate addresses more and more for security concerns across discontiguous subnets. it would be nice to be able to enter, say: 10.32.0.11 with a mask of 255.224.0.15 and have it tell me what IP addresses match that network. Obviously, it's for ACL work.
-jr.

This is doable today using the CIDR calculator tab.

I've requested this before, but here it is again.
Run the IP Address Management tool as a service & have the ability to stop the polling while adding subnets or reserving addresses.
We publish the results to our Orion server every 5 minutes, but must leave an account logged in to keep the application running.
The application freezes & is unusable while a subnet is being scanned (scanning several Class B's means there is very little time to make changes between polls).

Junyoure

Ok, then I'm dumber than I think, because I can't find anywhere in the CIDR functions of the subnet calc, where I can enter mask of 255.224.0.15. All the masks are preconfigured.

Take a second look please, yes, the mask I'm asking about is not a classfull nor CIDR mask. It's something else entirely. This would allow me to group given addresses in totally different networks by offset from their respective network addresses. (ie. 10.32.0.0/26 and 10.32.1.0/26 are the networks and I want to define the 10th address up from the network address in each range in an ACL--10.32.0.10 and 10.32.1.10, respectively.) This is a fairly easy task when there are only a few networks to deal with, but when you are trying to define this across 20,000 networks, a discontiguous mask of 255.224.0.15 allows me to effectively ignore the bit's that are different across all the networks, and identify the common elements of the layer 3 address (the 10.x.x.10 in my example.)

I'm doing this in production systems and it works great, but working out the math is agonizing, that's why I'm looking for a calc that will do it.

hope this helps clarify.

-jr.

#1, and only request.
Stop preventing the clipboard from working properly. I'm tired of the application *crashing* when I try to copy an item and paste it, and I'm also tired of the copy operation not actually working.
Disable this functionality entirely for all Solarwinds tools.

FormerMember

My top 5

1. Network Sonar - It doesnt do a DNS/SMB lookup so when i scan my network i have 6800 unidentified devices.

2. Network Sonar - A completed scan should allow you to expand identified device groups to view all the devices and their associated information.

3. Network Sonar - It would be helpful if you could assign subnets to scan on a regular basis and output to html.

4. Performance monitor - It would be helpful if nodes showed their IP address next to them.

5. Performance Monitor and IP Management - These should both run as a service.

dbatten

Option to run tools as services
Option to use SQLexpress (local or remote) for storing information
Better integration capabiliities with Orion and Cirrus
A CMDB lite tool--a database/user interface that maintains lookup information for use by the Toolset, Orion, Cirrus and LANsurveyor.

Today we are adding many custom fields to the Orion and Cirrus node & interface tables. This is out of necessity, and is highly administrative. Much of this functionality require lookup tables of "user defined information" and primary keys between the various SolarWinds products.

Example, I would like to build my physical layout (buildings, rooms, cabinets, locations) in one CMDB lite tool. Then use that information with the Orion and Cirrus.

rlsmith999

It seems to be a recurring theme, but PLEASE!!! Ability to run these tools as SERVICES! More companies are installing the Toolset on Multi-Use Servers, and cannot be logged into them 24/7.

This thread has been open over a year, and the official SW response is still "We cannot support this setup. The Toolset was never coded to run as a service except for the TFTP server." (for a ticket regarding "srvany.exe" to run Network Monitor).

ceclark

#1 Fix clipboard

#2 Remove Internet Explorer dependencies (ie MIB Browser).

#3 Have the ability to add/remove MIBS ourselves. I hate searching a list of a million MIBs when I need 10-20.

#4 Add an SCP server for secure file transfers

#5 More SNMPv3 support