How are auto dependecies calculated?

spuri

We have over 90 sites that have a firewall, switch, AP. Basically, when the firewall goes down, we want to suppress alerts on the corresponding switch and AP.

We have auto-dependency turned on. It seems to only calculate half of the relationships. For example, a lot of the times, it sees the AP behind the switch or AP behind the firewall but leaves out the relationship between the firewall and switch.

It is nearly impossible ot keep up with manual dependencies since we have sites like these stood up and taken down every 1-2 years.

How is the auto-dependency calculated? How can improve up on it?

mesverrum

https://support.solarwinds.com/SuccessCenter/s/article/What-object-IDs-OIDs-does-the-Orion-Platform-poll-for-network-topology-information

This is the bulk of it, NPM tries all the OID's listed there to see various ways that things can be connected together and then starts trying to build up the "map" that it uses for auto dependencies. One of the most common situations I have run into is that almost no firewalls support several of the OIDs, I assume they view it as a security thing. Since most firewalls won't tell us who is connected and which ports they are on then there is a gap in the map and the Auto Dependency has to guess, i cannot say how they determine how to make that guess but it was 50/50 wrong for me back when I had a topology like you describe.

For years I've been using a juiced up variant of the method described by @AlexSoul in this thread, https://thwack.solarwinds.com/t5/SAM-Documents/Automatic-Dependencies-Based-On-Custom-Properties-Node-Location/ta-p/516976, and it works very reliably for me. I used it most recently on a hospital chain with more than 350 locations and after we were done we audited it and the script was correct on all sites except our core datacenter, which had network topology that didn't really match up with the assumptions we had made. Took 5 minutes to correct that one location and then everything was solid.

This github post is the generic version of the script that I used, https://github.com/Mesverrum/MyPublicWork/blob/master/SetEdgeDependencies.ps1
The main change most people would need is to edit the sections where it determines which nodes should be the site parents (firewalls in your description) and which nodes are children.