Leveraging NCM’s “Find Connected Port for End Host” feature

I hope this blog post will clarify a few things about this feature, that you need to know in order to make it work.

This will ultimately be incorporated into the product documentation, but since we saw several users being unable to make it work to their satisfaction, we decided to get this information out, before the documentation update.

Before we start, let me remind you that NCM covers only limited user tracking use cases. A more complete list of use cases and much more powerful features are offered by the recently released product UDT. Mav has released a very informative blog post to explain the positioning of the several features and tools available in this area, here.

This feature is available on the NPM Integration module of NCM (therefore it requires NPM).

It also requires to manage both devices involved in the connection and the pair of interfaces involved in the connection.

For example, if you want to find-out where your workstations are connected to your switches, the workstations have to be discovered and managed by NPM as well as their interface involved in the connection. The switch and its interfaces have to be managed as well. It is not necessary to import the nodes representing the workstations in the NCM database.

While we are on this type of topic, here is another piece of information, related but different.

Users also ask sometimes about the level of management required to make the “NPM Network Topology” chart work:

Re-using the same example as above (workstations connected to switches), this feature does not require workstations to be managed at the interface level (they require licenses for PC’s at the node level only, ICMP-only management is sufficient)