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Network Discovery....

Hi everybody. In looking at the various way to add nodes to SAM for monitoring I was wondering if there is a way to not just import the node but to bring along some detailed information... i.e, Contacts, location ect. and populate the corresponding fields in the custom property section. Hopefully I made sense. Thanks for response.

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osborne_graham

Yes, its a bit of a hack but I use it many times in our environment. Other than scripting via the API you can populate custom fields via alerts. What I do is have a number of alerts dealing with different circumstances - For example if the custom field for 'location' is null and IP is in a range for head office (or in our case the DNS name starts with certain characters) then change the field to 'Head Office'. You can string multiple criteria together depending on your needs and restrict to just newly added servers if you don't want it running on your whole environment. I did a writeup on Thwack a while back for a particular use case but it also demonstrates setting custom fields using alerts. You can find that post here Giving back to Thwack - 1 (points 1 and 2) but if you need a more detailed how-to let me know and I'll put something together.

mesverrum

If you already have that detailed information in a spreadsheet or similar format then the easiest thing is to do the discovery to get the nodes into Orion then import the properties on the manage custom properties screen

cwjohnson3rd

Thanks for the reply. I tried the custom properties method and it seemed to work but it wiped out any node I had already put values in their custom property. Let me go into detail. I did a discovery for 5 nodes and the went to the custom prop. screen and imported an xls. I did a match for the IPs which seemed to work as the xls import had 1200 entries but I only six. I problem was the import seemed to wipe all the other nodes that had info in them. I must have missed something...

mesverrum

Yeah importing can clear data, its a bit of a nuisance but what I often do is export out the existing properties, merge my changes into the csv, then import that version back in. That way I don't lose any existing property data.

osborne_graham

We get servers being added by different people all the time so I dymaicly import any new servers from AD each night using network discovery then the custom fields are populated using alerts (as described in my post above) so by morning, even if I'm not in the office, servers are added and custom fields populated which in turn dynmaicly adds the server to groups which then dynmaicly applies various application monitors. I try to be lazy whenever possible :-)

cwjohnson3rd

I (we) will try that...