Both for our customers and our Support department it's very important to have a map, to be able to see the state of our network in one glance in a certain area. Say for example a sea-cable broke near Italy: one look at Italy on the map will show what sites are affected, regardless of whether they're grouped by supplier or whatever.
As far as I am aware, there are only two mapping tools for this purpose available in the NPM:
- Network Atlas
- Worldwide Map
Again as far as I'm aware, there is no way to automate the placement of nodes on the Network Atlas, since all documentation goes through the Network Atlas software tool. This makes this undesirable to use because our network is fairly large and new sites are added or cancelled on a daily basis, making it a real chore to keep this map up to date.
In the Worldwide Map this is, thankfully, possible and pretty easy. I have written a script that transfers(copies) nodes from our previous NMS to Solarwinds' and automatically pushes the node's geolocation (from custom properties) to the Worldwide Map. This was working wonderfully, until at some point the web interface just stopped working. The script kept running happily. It was just the web interface that become non-interactive. After some time I figured out that it was just the pages with a Worldwide map on it and that the Worldwide Map simply can't handle more than a 1000 nodes at one time (where is this even documented?).
Sidenode: 80% of our monitoring is ICMP only, so being able to sync custom properties with the Worldwide Map automatically would be grand.
Question 1:
Is there anything that I have overlooked that can provide such a worldwide map as we need it, for our 5000+ nodes and growing network, that doesn't require manual input? Our previous NMS (PRTG) had no issues with this whatsoever.
Once I found that out, I started investigating whether we could at least show a smaller scale map with just the nodes that are in a certain group on the Group Details page (which is better, but still not good enough). This is in fact possible, but only through a very ugly and cumbersome workaround. (As far as I know) you have to:
1) Create a new view for every group (every Worldwide Map instance seems to have a ResourceID that is linked to a viewID)
2) Edit the Worldwide Map for each view to only show the nodes in that group
3) Append the viewID to the default URL for that group and from now on use that to navigate to it.
Once more I have found no way to automate this process while there are currently ~500 groups to do this for and then we're not even talking about where to leave those ~500 new URLs that everone now has to use, while the intuitive way of navigating is by using the Group Summary.
Question 2:
Is there a way to flexibly change what is shown on the Worldwide map? Thinking beyond groups here, so using custom properties for this would would be nice: only show nodes for a certain supplier, end-customer, device-type, etc.