Scheduled discovery importing an IP list from a file

valerio.galantini

Hi guys,

I'm quite new to NPM and I have some questions about a few matters.. most important one is the following:

we are monitoring a very wide network, most of the nodes are distributed across Europe and the United States.

We currently have a list of the actual nodes (about 2000); some of these nodes are often not reachable and are connected to the network only on request.  I've already performed the discovery of these nodes (both the up and the down ones) importing the ip list in: 

Network Sonar Wizard -> Network -> Selection Method -> Specific Nodes

The IP list anyway is constantly growing, let's say about 50-100 more nodes to manage each month. Currently we have a web portal from where we can export the up-to-date list of IP in a scheduled way ( a job exports the list in a .csv file each day or on request)  and we would like to use this IP list to update the NPM database in an automatic way.

We can't rely on  Network Sonar Discovery because some of the IP we would like to monitor may not be connected to the network while doing the discovery and we basically don't want to manually insert each new node from the exported file each time. So my question is, is there a way to do it automatically? That is to say, can a network discovery take an ip list directly from a file?

A collateral question is: "Is there any command line utility to NPM so that we can do operations without using the web/graphic interface?"

markvl

We are currently evaluating NPM and we come up against this also.

We manage over 5000 network devices for well over 50 customers. Our network devices are all in a CMDB. There are daily changes in the managed device lists.

We would very much like to automate the discovery and import process. What I would like to see is:

• Discover devices based on a list which gives the IP address and the community string
• Give a filter for which interfaces are imported. This should be compound, like: 
  • Interface has an IP address
  • OR Interface has <string> in the description field
  • OR Interface is of type <type>
• Add a list of custom properties to the discovered devices (like customer, contract nr., etc.)
• Put the discovered devices in groups

And I also second the request for a CLI. Things we would like to be able to do using this include:

• Removing devices from the database when they are decommissioned or the contract ends
• Setting maintenance windows for (groups of) devices based on our SLAs
• Adding or changing custom property fields for (groups of) devices
• Rediscover specific devices

 I realize some of these actions can be done by going into the database directly, but we prefer to have a supported way of doing this.

 

Edit: I did find this script but as I said, I would prefer a supported solution.