NCM & NPM integration

I can answer part of your question...

I have a job setup inside NCM that runs weekly that imports all nodes that have a custom property set to true.  (We called it NCM_Import.)  So far it works pretty well.  You could set it to run more often if you like but we don't add devices that frequently.  The job was pretty easy to setup.  You basically go in a create a map of the tables you want.  It lists the nodes and the tables then you select what NCM tables you want the data imported into.

For your second question.  We have it setup so that the configuration information for all the devices is listed on the node details.  This follows the standard restrictions that are built into NPM for node limitiations.  You can also select what NCM resorces the person can see.

I hope that helps.

yep that definitely does help thanks. I'm happy to hear that the NCM resources can have restrictions applied to them.

The node Import Job is something I've considered using before but never actually used. We have a pretty hectic network with a lot of changes happening each week and devices being added or removed everyday. 

Because it's a Custom Property I pressume the 'true' state has to be entered manually (this isn't a problem if it does have to be). But my concern is what happens if the 'true' state isn't removed before the next Import job runs, could NCM end up adding duplicates of the same device? 

Me thinks some testing is needed. Thanks for your reply

Regards

You're very welcome!

The import doesn't create duplicats.  Here's a sample from the last email I got:

8/22/2009 12:00:01 PM : Started NPM Import : Job-680360   Imported/merged 0 devices Skipped 1038 devices   8/22/2009 12:00:11 PM : Completed NPM Import : Job-680360

So from this note there were no devices added but 1038 devices listed.  I just use the true/false (false is default) value to indicate if the device should be imported or not.  That way things like servers, ups's, etc don't get imported.  We have the SLX licese for Orion so we monitor nearly everything we can but we have a limited NCM license.  In the case above we have nearly 300 device in NCM as a reference.  It also doesn't import duplicate devices. 

True does have to be entered manually... I keep hoping SW will add drop down boxes as an option to CP's.  (Hint hint hint... )

I've never tried the remove portion.  Our network is pretty static and we aren't fully utilizing NCM yet.  (We got NCM and NPM at the same time and most of my focus has been on NPM.) 

Thanks again for your replies.

I just have one final question. When you schedule the job how do you input the selection criteria so the scheduled job will know to only add the devices with the custom property of 'True'  I have Custom properties already set up on my devices and I should be able to leverage these existing CP's but I can't find where in the import schedule I can can add a selection criteria based on Custom Properties.

I have seen how a user manually running the import job can view the custom properties and make the decision on which nodes to add but I can't find where this can be set on a scheduled job

thanks in advance

There is an import option called "EnableOrionImport" I have that set on the True/False custom property I have.  It will only import items that have True set on that field.

When you build the job there is an import Tab, when you click on it it will start what looks like an import job.  Just fill it out and you'll get what you need.

We are running a 4000+ nodes installation of NPM and having serious issues on importing the nodes automatically to NCM (all nodes import without any manual work involving the custom property): the import job just hangs at some point.

I have created a ticket on this, but for some reason I haven't yet had SolarWinds to understand the problem. I have been instructed to use the manually edited custom property. Well, that is what we are using at the moment (as we don't have any other way!).

The import was working earlier in the summer but at the moment it stucks in the middle of the import, and this is the problem I'm searching a solution to.

Importing 4000 nodes takes 5-6 minutes (when it is successful) in our environment.

Deleting the node in NPM does not cause it to be removed in NCM. This is going to be somewhat annoying soon, as our customer's nodes are being added and deleted frequently. We don't use NCM to monitor (poll) the devices, but NCM still shows a status icon for every device, so the node list is getting more red every day in NCM. Using man power to delete nodes from several places costs money for the customer, so some kind of automation option would be nice.

I have also suggested SolarWinds to add a possibility to use SNMP community for selecting the nodes to import from the NPM database to NCM database, this would help us a lot.

Hmm, that gave me an idea: an SQL update query, run every night, setting the EnableOrionImport variable to true/false according to the node SNMP community... that could even work. (Comments, anyone?)

Markku

I got the import job up and running, I'm lucky in the sense that both node databases are almost a mirror image of each other so I didn't have to filter that much.

I have also sync all of the relative Custom Properties on both of the systems so that when a user adds a node to Oion they will add the Custom properties during that process and later when the import job runs the Node and it's custom properties are added to NCM. Great, saves lots of time. But one thing I have noticed with this featues however is that blank custom property feilds in NPM are being added to NCM with zeros in the feild.

Is there anyway to prevent NCM from filling the blank feilds with '0's ? 

I am checking for hidden characters at the moment, but any other suggestion would be helpful

Ciag, thanks for the feedback.   I'll see if we can add the ability to insert blank fields instead of 0's for blank custom properties.  For internal folks, this is being tracked as #4309