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Revamp Network Discovery

I posted this earlier, but for some reason it appears to be gone.

I am working on a new instance of Solarwinds for my company to replace the old one, and network discovery has kind of sucked so far. We have over 100 sites, and I'm building discoveries for each site, as we expect to be migrating them to new hardware soon, but the addresses will be the same. In working with this, I've found some pain points in working with the current setup of Network Discovery.

First, I am creating a network discovery for each site. This may be a unique case to me, but we are expecting new hardware to be installed in the same subnets, but not necessarily the same IPs. By keeping this discovery profile I can discover the new hardware or re-discover interfaces, drives, etc for the new hardware. I currently have over 100 discovery profiles built, and I would love to sort them categorically to make navigation a bit easier.

The next pain point I discovered, is clicking next through the discovery profiles once they are built. Sometimes I just want to change the schedule, or the monitoring tab. But I have to click next through each field, and it makes doing many changes to many profiles difficult. I would love to be able to click up top to skip to a specific step or see all the steps on a single page.

Finally, changing discovery scheduling is the worst of the offenders listed in the above reason. It now takes me 8 or so clicks to be able to even get to the point that I can make the change I need to make. Our instance needs work/processing power so this can be painfully slow at times.

Some proposed solutions for thought:

First: Organizational groups/folders for the various discovery profiles. Then we can sort by region, vendor, technology, etc.

Second: Consolidate the multiple pages to a view similar to modifying multiple nodes through the Manage Nodes page. Allow checkboxes to be ticked to modify a specific field (SNMP, Scheduling, etc)

Third: Allow scheduling to be set at the top level instead of digging into individual discovery profiles.

I'd love to hear suggestions if there are better ideas!

Thanks,
Bryan

bdufresne
Parents

  •  You're not wrong. I hate when people come to me with problems and no idea of a solution, so I kind of went that route. I have added a "narrative" of the issues I've run into that made those solutions come to mind. I had that stuff initially, but like I said, my post disappeared somehow after I added an edit. Guess I never resubmitted it.

     I did export the nodes, but the problem is the last instance wasn't actually managed. People just imported garbage and didn't specify anything. Rather than pulling the garbage straight back in, I built groups with dynamic queries, custom properties, and some custom SQL for functional areas like networking and servers as I've been going. I've found it easier to identify/problem solve the past issues by doing it in chunks. 

    I appreciate the tips, and we are doing most of those things with the exception of the L2 switch stacks. We are running Meraki so it's sort of like an isolated management VLAN, but also not. The network was managed pretty well except for the hodge podge of devices added with no custom properties to categorize them, but the servers and other networked devices (UPS, Generators, Environmental sensors, etc) really made everything look more hectic.

    I expect to go through and build more discoveries for the datacenters and on-site servers soon, and I will have to create 30 or so more discoveries to get the rest of that in. I really just think the "wizard" aspect of it is kind of clunky and could be implemented in similar ways to other features within NPM.

    Thanks for the input from both of you!

    Bryan

Comment

  •  You're not wrong. I hate when people come to me with problems and no idea of a solution, so I kind of went that route. I have added a "narrative" of the issues I've run into that made those solutions come to mind. I had that stuff initially, but like I said, my post disappeared somehow after I added an edit. Guess I never resubmitted it.

     I did export the nodes, but the problem is the last instance wasn't actually managed. People just imported garbage and didn't specify anything. Rather than pulling the garbage straight back in, I built groups with dynamic queries, custom properties, and some custom SQL for functional areas like networking and servers as I've been going. I've found it easier to identify/problem solve the past issues by doing it in chunks. 

    I appreciate the tips, and we are doing most of those things with the exception of the L2 switch stacks. We are running Meraki so it's sort of like an isolated management VLAN, but also not. The network was managed pretty well except for the hodge podge of devices added with no custom properties to categorize them, but the servers and other networked devices (UPS, Generators, Environmental sensors, etc) really made everything look more hectic.

    I expect to go through and build more discoveries for the datacenters and on-site servers soon, and I will have to create 30 or so more discoveries to get the rest of that in. I really just think the "wizard" aspect of it is kind of clunky and could be implemented in similar ways to other features within NPM.

    Thanks for the input from both of you!

    Bryan

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