User Device Tracker 2.0 Beta!
Our development team has been very active since the initial release of UDT earlier this year. There are a ton of new items in this release, but this post will cover the top features and fixes. If you are interested in participating in the beta and you have active maintenance, simply fill out this survey and I’ll send the beta to you. Remember, betas are not supported in production so you will need to install this on a separate server than your current production UDT server.
1. Adding the “User” to User Device Tracker
We have added support for collecting user information from Active Directory. This allows you to quickly see who is logged in to a specific machine and what port the machine and user are connected to. Simply add your active directory domain controllers and we will poll the server’s event log for login events. These events will be stored in the UDT database so when you search for a user or run reports, we simply search the UDT database for this information. Here are some screenshots of the new features.
The All User Log Ins resource is available on summary (ie: UDT Home) and detail pages (ie: Node Details or Endpoint Details).
We also added the concept of UDT detail pages. Here is screenshot of the detail page. Although this screenshot doesn’t show it off, many of the values from AD are pulled in and added to this user detail page.
2. Improved back end topology using CDP and LLDP
To provide the data you need, UDT relies on accurate network topology information. In 1.0 the topology was created based on mapping ports to each other. In 2.0 we’ve added support for CDP and LLDP. When we poll the node, we will collect the CDP and LLDP information from the node (if available) and will use that topology information to create the connections on the back end. Although there aren’t any resources that will actually show off this new information now, you should see the results in the data accuracy.
3. Reports and Alerts
In 2.0 we’ve added several reports and alerts. Although we still have a lot of improvements to make, this should help with the most common requests for reports and alerts.
We now ship the following reports: All endpoints by VLAN, Port Capacity by Switch, All endpoints with details, Number of Connected devices by port, List of all IPv6 Addresses in your network, OUI Summary Report, Unused Port Report.
For alerts, we added a few alerts that will notify you when a new device is connected to the network. This will primarily be based on seeing a new MAC address on the network.
4. Changes to search
Search is often used for more than what is was intended for. Search should help you to quickly find where something is connected. It turns out, having all of that information is really handy! Unfortunately, large environments often experience timeouts and long delays when searching because of the amount of data available. To help users find what they are looking for quickly, we have split out the detailed results from search. Now, when you search, if there is one exact match, you will be taken directly to a a detail page (user or endpoint). If there are multiple matches, they will be shown in the list and you can quickly select the one that you are looking for to go to its detail page. But you really liked all of the data from the original search? No problem. We have moved this to Ad-hoc reporting. This better captures the workflow for running reports against the data in UDT.
5. Endpoint detail pages
Similar to the concept of User detail pages, we’ve added an endpoint detail page that will give you all of the information you need about specific endpoints. For example, if you search for a computer (IP, MAC, or hostname) then you will be taken to the endpoint detail page which will give you detailed port information as well as connection information.
