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Due to the amount that merging would improve NPM is there any thought to merging NTM into NPM

I ask cause one of the most time consuming jobs we have is creating and updating network topology maps. It just seems like NTM ( even a scaled down version) could be merged into Network Atlas and greatly increase the value of NPM as a whole. I saw this had been listed on the idea board at one time but was marked as implemented.

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adatole

All yours, buddy.

rob.hock

We are definitely interested in improving our mapping functionality (and moving to web) in the future. NTM would certainly serve as a good basis to do so (and in fact shares a lot of topology information with NPM.)

We did a poll that on this topic just a few months ago:

dmartzall

Honestly, I would have voted for the increased cost to give a better overall experience. One stumbling block you run into if you have two separate products handling mapping is the possibility to miss something or fat finger an entry. I found our Quebec City map had nodes from Birmingham on it. While the scans are long to get the updates for the maps, they can be scheduled like our regular rediscovery scans to find new devices. I can understand places where they're not having many moves/adds/changes on the network not seeing the value in the dynamic mapping of the network. But companies like mine that expand and acquire new companies it would be a huge time saver.

dusk2dusk

I am a fairly new customer with most of the Orion suite bells and whistles now at my disposal. We transitioned from ManageEngine and I find Solarwinds truly a step up. Some things are a step back like the scalability of built in reporting but all in all it's a better, tighter suite. Be that as it may, the NetBrain demos I looked at while at Cisco Live and beyond have been phenomenal and if I were SW, I would be clearly looking at matching that level of functionality from mapping. As evidenced by my experience with reporting which required me to take on way more SQL than I should have, the mapping portion feels incomplete and antiquated. I have both NTM and obviously Atlas but only used NTM so far. My company use to standardize on 3Com and their Network Supervisor product did essentially what NTM does. That was 8 years ago when we started using that. I would be squarely looking at the ease and dynamic functionality that NetBrain employs at the forefront. NTM and Atlas just feel like back-end tack ons. Even though I have both I would pay for the advanced mapping as possibly a one time upgrade. I would refuse to pay per node beyond what we have already for NPM/NTA etc. NPM is a great product that has been easy to use(although the integration or not integration of IPAM/UDT has been hard to figure) and I would love to see actually integrated dynamic mapping that sits on top of Orion. Also, I would be willing to test this new mapping and or interface should it come down the pike.... hint hint

cobrien1

If you have Orion, NTM in the web just makes sense. NTM provides value even without Orion though. If NTM were pushed to the web, customers who don't own Orion would likely find that to be a very strange thing for their needs. As an example, if you're a consultant doing discovery on a new network, it would be less than ideal to run a web server, interact via a web site, and pay the development tax for that multi-user, web based experience even though you're the only user.

It's a difficult balance. Although we've put considerable thought into the balance that we have today, I'm sure we could do better and we've been talking about that quite a bit recently.

As it happens, we might have a beta for NTM coming out soon that may include significant UI changes. I'll put you on the list to contact!