Lost Historical Data

The company I work for is making a major change in its network at the moment. They are replacing all their site (200+) from Cisco 1811s and 1721s with 2811s and putting them on a different providers network. So far I have only converted 5 or so and with each one I have had to delete the old node and add the new one, so that my maps would continue to be green and it would start collecting new data.

However, they forgot to tell me that they wanted the old data so that they could compare the old router and network, with the new routers and network. I am assuming that all the old data is lost now, for the 5 I have done. What is the best practice going forward so that I can keep that data and write reports that would compare the old to the new so that they can determine if the costs are worth the change?

Any advice would be terrific.

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psarsfield

You could just unmanage the old nodes, remove them from any relevant maps, and leave them in Orion until such time that you no longer need the data from them. This is only particularly tricky if you are reusing the same IP addressing for management (But they could be changed to something bogus).

Just be sure that you have Orion set to retain the level of detailed statistics that you want for a long enough period of time.

Geoo

Thanks for the suggestion. Possible I could do that but it would get messy with as many routers as we are changing.

What I do not understand is why I cannot simply rediscover the resources, select the new interfaces, and that information be populated out to the node details screen. It shows the new router in the node details, but the interfaces still show up as the old ones. Also, in Netflow Manager the interfaces are the old ones.

If I could just re-discover the interfaces then I wouldnt have to delete the old node and the data should remain.

Jim

NexusNet

This is also a major issue for our organization. We have opened a support case with Solar Winds for this issue. It seems odd that this is not a feature of an enterprise level monitoring software. Historical data is very important in having an overall understanding of network performance and having to lose this data from a device replacement or interface upgrade does not make sense.

Were you ever able to determine the best way to accomplish this?

Adam

robertcbrowning

I guess that it's a bit late now, but you could have restored your old backup database to an evaluation system & done some SQL queries to extract the missing data before adding it back into the live system. It's a bit messy, but that's what backups are for.

Going forward, you're right, if old IPs and old names conflict with the new ones, it gets very messy. Unmanaging the devices is a 1st step, but renaming and re-IPing will put these de-installed devices out of harms way. Then you can safely add, discover, etc the new devices. If you've already re-discovered the interfaces on the new devices before you have renamed/re-IPed them, you will have the old interfaces shown as unknown in addition to the new ones.