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Network Discovery - workflow issues

I've been trying hard to get some value out of the Network Discovery (Sonar) function that was introduced with v10, but I'm not having a good time.

The prime issue I am having is actually a workflow issue rather than a technical issue.

We tend to manually define nodes in Orion. As a service provider, we don't have the need (or even wish) to perform subnet scans of our customer networks. When we add a node however, there is no way to have this node automatically populated into a generic network sonar discovery job (or perhaps different jobs based upon a custom property like network name).

After I add a node, I can manually update a network sonar job with the new host - but now I've introduced another activity as part of the add node process. I also don't have the ability to even do a reconciliation check without some external SQL reports (can I trust the network teams to always update the appropriate network sonar job?).

Even when the network sonar job is modified, it then needs to be run (either manually or wait for the schedule). Why can't we have the topology information collected for the single new node and added to the topology database as soon as it is added or modified?

The problem this brings is again a workflow issue. When a user adds a node or modifies node, in general they want to update the map as part of the same workflow. Unless the network sonar job has been run, the connect:now option is effectively useless.

I can see a lot of time and energy has been expended on this new feature - I don't think however I'm seeing the full value. I would be interested in what others think - am I off on my own here?

Dave.

  

  • Dave

    I don't think your on your own, I've looked at the schedule discovery and while it would be useful to have some measure of auto generating maps, topology DB and Node search within NCM the downside of always being told every single switch your monitoring has new items discovered (we only monitor the uplinks and nothing else) and the chore of having to go through every single switch and hiding the interface from further discoveries is just not practical for us. 

    Personally I would of preferred Solarwinds not to off released the schedule discovery and done some more work on it with its customers and then released a more useful addition to NPM.

    Jon