I'm curious what others are doing to extend the usefulness of NPM. What are you doing?
The best extension of NPM that we do is running a variety of PowerShell scripts (Get-ADUsers; Get-ADComputer; Get-ADGroups, lots of other domain get scripts) and we write the results to a SQL database that is on the NPM SQL server. This puts all of my domain and NPM type data on the same server, giving the ability to create all kinds of reports that can be displayed in NPM or PowerBI dashboards. It is handy to have all that data pumping into one location. Some reports are NPM only, some external PowerShell only and some are combinations.
Examples of reports / dashboards displayed in the NPM single pane of glass:
- Difference comparisons like - what servers do I have in AD that aren't monitored by NPM (this is very handy)
- User / computer accounts in AD not logging in to the domain in the past xx days
- Current administrators of critical systems / groups / built in groups
- Contact info for all vendors / ISPs, etc. - that info can now be added to outage alerts so the alert contains all the contact info, including site users based on group membership
- Other contact lists pulled from AD; displayed and used in NPM
- Variety of health checks ran using PowerShell but displayed by SQL query in a custom table view
- Display of any type of AD attribute in NPM dashboard, really
The PowerShell script run automated from SQL jobs, which also handle the uploading and historical info - now you know when an account was locked out, disabled, changed, ect. for as long as you want to maintain the history.
Anyway, that is how we've extended NPM and made it the single pane of glass for everything including all the things that NPM doesn't do out of the box. This also puts you on a good footing if you need to move dashboards / displays to PowerBI.
How are you extending NPM?
