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Easily add technician contact information to Solarwinds Maps

I was wondering if there was a way to easily enter technician contact information into Solarwinds maps. We would like to make it easy for our help desk to find the contact information of our techs when troubleshooting network performance issues in the field. We are looking for a solution that would make this more automatic. We don't want to edit every map in "Network Atlas" when we get new techs in an area. Please let me know your thoughts. Is anybody else doing this?

  • Idea: Add a custom property on the node of contact information, have that displayed as part of the "custom status objects" on a node?  You go to a map, hit edit on it from the website, and go to "Edit custom map tooltips" and add your custom property to nodes. Of course, this depends on what you're trying to do which I don't understand 100%.

    Do the techs change, or are you saying you spin up new maps with new nodes when you have new techs? Or? How are you identifying an "area" currently? Custom properties are going to be what you need almost guaranteed but you need to provide more info on what you're doing with the current data in solarwinds.    

  • Here are some answers to your questions:

    Do the techs change? Yes the techs change more than the maps do. I am looking for a solution that would allow us update all of the maps contact information when a technician changes. We currently have to edit each map individually when a tech changes. A technician may be responsible for many map locations.

    How are you identifying an "area" currently? The techs have areas assigned to them based on business units. This areas are assigned by our field coordinator manager and can change based on company needs. An area is usually many plants/factories that manufacturer a similar good.

    I thought of the customer property solution. Is it possible to create a node that does not tie to an actual piece of equipment that can be utilized for custom field information? This would allow me to drop the node on the maps that technician is responsible for.

  • Custom properties can be associated with whatever - interfaces, nodes, etc. They can be updated through scripts and/or updated en-masse. So you can update 10-100 of a particular custom property for $tech at a time. If the map is static but the only change is the details, that would fix a part of that.  You can indeed make an entry on a map which is a blank node, or a node in orion that is labeled "external node" and therefore doesn't poll anything. Both can work.

    I don't understand entirely the purpose of the nodes on the map though - are you looking for people to go from "map of stuff -> this tech works on it"? or are you looking to go "this stuff on this page is handled by (person)? Because you could also stuff things into groups with dynamic queries (which define what's in a group based on your own criteria).  If the group name is the contact person and something is down in $group, you know which tech should be working on it. That might not really need a map, per-se.

    Looping in adatole​ in case he has some ideas how to simplify this emoticons_silly.png

  • We have a after-hours NOC that monitors the network. The NOC also performs some basic level troubleshooting using the Network Maps. The NOC then escalates the issue to the Tech in the field when they can no longer bring the network issue to a resolution. We want them to see the technicians information on the network map for the location. This puts all of the information in place for the after-hours NOC tech. The solution that I am looking for would make it easier to update the Field Technicians information in the MAPs without having to utilize Network Atlas to edit every site.

  • We used the google map hack that was posted around v10.5 or so. It's old but works very well for us. We have the weather overlays and also plot sites on the map using GPS cords. The green dots are a site we monitor, if there is an alarm on any deivce at the location the dot turns red. Can then click the dot to see each item at that site by using custom properties. Click on the alarming device from the drop down and you are at the standard device view as if you had located it via the manage nodes view or search. Does this meet what you are looking for? You could include support info in the custom properties as others have listed and then pull that data along with the node name from the drop down. It would require a little custom work but could be done by anyone with a good SQL background I would imagine.

    nodedetails.jpg