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WAN site monitoring - best practice

Hi Im a new SW customer and still getting to grips with the basics. We have over 150 WAN sites connected with MPLS, IP-VPN, Meraki etc..a good mixed bag. Just looking for some good ideas on how to monitor these, HUGE map (not realy practical) or Grpus for each site etc...some sites have 100's devices some have less than 30

what do the rest of you guys do with large numbers of sites...

NPM, NTA, SAM, SRM and VM..."in for a penny2

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deverts

Welcome!

Let's start with the obvious, what SolarWinds products and modules did you purchase?

Next, Solarwinds has gone to great development lengths to add some auto-discovery techniques to assist you, but there is nothing better than personally knowledge of the network to ensure everything is monitored, and nothing is missed. So, you can configure auto-discovery, but be prepared to spend time manually verifying. Every environment is different, so there is no way to say if the discovery will be successful for you or not.

Third, start small!!! The last thing you want to do is get yourself frustrated by trying to do all the sites at the same time, only to be overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude or data. Personally, I would auto-discover a small site, import the data, and make sure it's what you want. If its not, delete the devices, tweak your discovery and do it over. DOCUMENT your steps! Once your happy with the discovery, try a large site to make sure it still works for both. Then you have a template for discovering everything.

Gotcha: SW monitors all active ports by default. Most admins only want to monitor uplinks. To only monitor uplinks, you'll have to manually disable monitoring on the other ports. Example: a 48-port switch with 48 active ports and 2 uplinks, you will have to disable monitoring on 48 access ports manually.

This should get you going, assuming you purchased at least Orion NPM.

d09h

I inherited many maps, but our environment has so many devices being added or removed...it became unsustainable and pointless. We have a custom property that is kind of like a region. And all of our devices are named with a region as the first part of the name. I show 'All Nodes' type of resources grouped by region and status. That region custom property is the basis for membership in a group (via dynamic query). The settings on the group have been set to ensure the group is not green if anything in the group is down (Status rollup mode: Mixed status shows warning).

I've traded the mindset of 'update a whole bunch of maps' with 'make sure I set a custom property'. Huge time saver. While maps can look nice, I can't justify time to maintain and remove orphans.

deverts, if I had to guess, I would bet he's running "NPM, NTA, SAM, SRM and VM..."

deverts

I guess I should have read the entire posting. I was so preoccupied with helping, I didn't completely read the final statement.

d09h

Custom properties make your life easier. As I mentioned, they can be the basis for membership in a group. Aside from that, you will likely want to limit by or sort by the custom properties you decide to create.

Ever done any programming? Think of it like hard-coding something (ugghhh!) vs. using a variable. More extensible and flexible.

captgrumpypants

Check here. I used this method for monitoring Meraki MX devices and links in my previous position.

https://thwack.solarwinds.com/t5/NPM-Discussions/Meraki-SDWAN-Link-Status-Monitoring/m-p/73613