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Hi, Patrick Hubbard again from SolarWinds and this is the second video in our series
on getting the most out of your SolarWinds NPM Evaluation.
In the first video we saw how to get it installed
and in this video we're going to focus on discovering your network and creating network maps.
Again if you have any questions, click the "Ask a Geek" button below and we'll help you out.
Right let's get started.
Okay, the first thing that's going to happen after you log on,
and again it's "Admin", "Blank", as the default password here,
is that it's going to bring you to the "Network Sonar Wizard"
It's literally going to walk you through the process of doing your first network discovery.
You can control the scope, the credentials you are going to use, the types of devices
and services that you want to pull in, literally we're just going to fill this thing out.
Now it's still open to my RDP session here
and the performance of a web browser is going to be a little bit better locally,
so I've switched over to a local web browser here and again
I've just connected directly with the IP address of this machine and it's still on 8787 the default port
and this is the view we get if I go to it not through the link after the first logon.
So remember it's going to take you directly to the "Sonar Wizard" the first time.
If you open it in another browser you're going to come to the main front page
and it's not populated with anything.
But it does give you this resource right here and again resources are these boxes
or rectangles you see all over what we call views. So the view is the page we are looking at
and the resources are things on that view. So the very first one here in Discover My Network.
So if I click on it, it's going to take me to the exact same wizard.
So we're going to go ahead and fill this in and it's going to do discover on our network.
It's going to be combining SNMP, WMI; it's going to be using the APIs for vSphere
and Hyper-V, so all of that is going to happen and it will just walk us through all the steps
of just collecting the authentication information that we need for that.
Here I've got public and private by default, they are SNMP credentials.
If I want to I can add a credential for SNMP v3.
I'm not going to do that here, I'll say, "Next".
On this step it's going to ask me to get the credentials to pull up for VMware
and this is where it's really cool. If it discovers a server that is running ESX or ESXi
it will go ahead and pull that into our environment as well.
So I'm going to go ahead and add a credential for that one.
I'm going to give it a name.
Give it a user.
Give it a password.
And by the way our ESX Server password is...I'm not going to give you that.
I'll click "Add".
And I've added that credential. So you can add as many as you want
and it will actually try multiple credentials when it detects a ESX Server
or something that it's discovered through SNMP or WMI and it will go ahead
and test for several different credentials to figure out which one if the right one for that system.
I'll click "Next".
If I want to actual connect to any Windows devices I can put that in. So I'm definitely going to add that.
So just like before I'm going to give this credential a name.
And the thing to remember here is it is also adding each one of these credentials to the credentials manager
so you can reuse them later on without having to re-enter them every time.
Alright. I've clicked "Add" so I've added that admin. So I can add as many as I want.
In fact I'm going to go ahead and add one more.
This time I'm going to do it with the domain.
Some Windows servers on the lab network seem to be okay with using the domain
and some of them don't so I'm just going to go ahead and give it both
and that way it'll have chance to test both every time it does a discovery.
Alright, so that takes care of my SNMP discovery, VMware discovery, Windows discovery.
The next thing it's going to do is ask me for the scope of the network.
And there's a lot of different ways you can do this.
Typically you're not going to scan an entire IP address range and it's handy to start small and maybe expand out.
The great thing is you can also rerun this Wizard at anytime; you can schedule it to run automatically,
you can have it do it at a particular time of day. We'll see all of that here in a second.
But I'm just going to discover the lab.
That ought to pretty much get it. I'll click "Next".
And then I'm going to have my standard discovery settings here. Right?
So if I want to I can go ahead and give this discovery a name
so if I have multiples discoveries running at the same time,
when it gets done with the discovery I will be able to figure out which one.
So I'll call that "First Scan"
and then I can go ahead and set some of my timeouts and retries.
So in this case I can actually set my SNMP timeout threshold, how many hops did it go,
overall timeout for the discovery is kind of handy if you are not entirely sure how many devices
it is going to discover and you don't want it running for two or three hours, you can actually limit that.
In this case I'm going to leave all of this default.
You can either use the sliders here or put the values in. I'll click "Next".
And then it's going to ask me about Discovery Scheduling.
So I can tell it how often I want to run it, do I want to run it right now?
Or do I want to wait until later?
And so in case you haven't noticed it then this is the same wizard you can use for any discovery
not just our initial discovery. You can have it run overnight. You can have it run every night.
Automatically discovering devices and as we can see once it is done,
it will even prompt you to tell you it found new devices during the last discovery.
Okay, so we're all set, I've got my values in. I'm going to click "Discover".
And the discovery is running. So I can either sit here or wait for it to finish.
It probably going to take little less than an hour to scan the network
so I'm going to go eat lunch, I recommend this is a good thing for you too! Hit pause and we'll be back in a second.
So I'm back from lunch and the scan is complete.
It took about 45 minutes to go against all the machines in the lab
and the screen it takes me to here has all the results.
If I had run this overnight or it has run for a really long time and the browser timed out,
when you came back to the main results interface it will have a discovery results bar on the top
and when you click on that it will take you to this view.
The first thing it is doing is telling me all the different devices that it found.
So I can see it discovered my Windows servers, about 5 different VMware machines,
it found everything from Citrix to switches.
It's got my EMC boxes; it's got my Aruba wireless gear here, the Brocade
all of this stuff has been discovered automatically.
I do have 305 unknowns here and my guess is that's a number of devices I didn't have credentials for.
You can choose to either uncheck that here and it won't import them or you can go ahead
and import them and you can go in and adjust the credentials afterwards.
And either run the discovery one at a time or it will automatically rediscover them
once you change the credentials.
But I think this looks good to me so I'm going to say "Next"
and again this is Wizard-based so it's real easy to use.
And the next thing it's going to ask me about is the interfaces I want to import.
I really don't care about my Loopback so I'm going to uncheck that,
but all the rest look pretty good to me so I'll press "Next".
And the next thing it's going to ask me about is the volumes that I want to include.
And you can see it's already left unchecked my removable media here
because I really don't need to watch that, unless you are interested you might want to check those.
But I'm going to say no, and hit "Next".
And it's going to ask me then which of the settings I want to be imported and for my interfaces.
I'm actually going to import everything including the ones I've put in a shutdown state, I'll say "Next".
And now NPM is going to present a list of all the objects that it's going to import.
And look at this, this is all the interfaces, nodes, the VMs, everything else it's about to add
to my system as a result of that discovery.
That looks good to me; I'm going to click "Import".
Alright, so now NPM is importing all the objects discovered using the Network Sonar Wizard.
This is going to take a couple of minutes so we will fast forward through this section.
Okay, so I can see here that my import is finished by looking here at the end of the import result window,
and click "Finish".
And that brought me back to my Sonar Discovery view again telling me that the scan completed.
That is was manual and when it ran. Well let's take a look at what we got.
I'm going to click on the "Home" tab and the first thing you will notice
is that all the devices we imported and right now they are grouped by vendor.
Makes it pretty easy to get in here and see what we've got.
I can drill into one of these devices
which brings me to its Node Details page and I can actually see how busy the CPU is,
the interfaces, everything else all in that view.
It also gives me the network tab, all of my managed nodes,
a little bit of extra advice here on getting started in this top resource
and I can actually see we are getting alerts already, I can see the hardware health data
and the events that the system is generating. So it's alive and well.
And then the last tab here is the Virtualization tab.
Which is going to give me a list of all the VMs I discovered both for Hyper-V and ESX.
The next thing we are going to do is create some custom maps.
This is really easy to do using "Network Atlas".
So to start "Atlas" I'm going to come back to my desktop and I'll say "Start > Network Atlas".
Now the first thing we are going to see here is the Connect to Server dialog and what is interesting is,
if we were just running this off of the desktop here we wouldn't really need this.
But you can actually download Atlas directly onto your workstation and then push the maps up that way
so you don't need to RDP to the server.
I'm going to login here as "Admin, Blank" as I haven't really reset it, and you really should.
And that's going to bring you to the "Atlas" Start screen.
In fact here it's going to remind you of the steps you go through to create a new map.
You are going to go ahead and choose a background you like.
Drag some objects on there, in this case some nodes we've automatically imported using Discovery.
I'm going to use ConnectNow to automatically wire them up
and I'm going to customize the layout a little bit, get them looking the way I want.
Save it, and then we can view that in the web interface.
Let's close this, and I have already selected a background image
that I like so I'm going to change background, browse down here to my desktop,
and that's a nice map background.
And then I'm going to add some objects that we pulled in during discovery.
And here I've actually got them viewed by vendor and there are a number of other ways you can sort that
and this is going to be a little bit of a drag and drop exercise
so we will speed up through this section so you can watch me do everything but you don't have to wait.
Okay so, I've got all of my nodes on my map, so the next thing I want to do is
actually get them connected based on the topology data we pulled in during discovery.
So to do that I'm just going to select all the things I want to connect.
I'm going to go over here and click on "ConnectNow".
It's going to tell me that these 14 objects have been mapped.
And if I select "Off" you can actually see how they are connected.
Now there are a couple of different ways I can lay this out.
I can manually drag and drop these where I want and that's probably something you will end up doing
especially if you are mapping it to a Visio diagram or something else like that,
but if you are really looking at a bunch of workstations and you want to create an abstract map
another way you can do that is by using the layout guides.
So if I wanted to I can do that a bunch of different ways
and I'm going to further refine this a little bit as I've kind of got these guys scattered all over the place.
So really I would like for that to be a little smaller.
Okay, so I've got my objects on map now and I can actually zoom in here if I want.
You can also hover over these objects and you are going to see the same things you see
once it's available on the website which lets you preview it
and make sure you are happy with the way it all looks.
I think that's great, although we probably won't have nodes out in the ocean
so we should probably put them on land.
That looks good to me. Alright so let's save that map.
We are going to save that as:
"My First Map" and click "OK".
Now the map's already been added to the database, so all I need to do now is select it
inside the map resource on the front page of the NPM interface.
I'm going to come back over here to my web interface
and now remember this was our sample map, right?
Which means essentially it is an unformatted map. I click on "Edit".
This editor knows I am looking at a map so it's going to give me a catalogue of available maps.
I say "My First Map", "Submit".
And here's our new map right here inside of NPM.
It's already ready to go and as we previewed before earlier in Atlas I can now see
through the web the status for each one of these objects, if I hover over the links
I get my interface details including the topology information we got from the scan.
Alright, so we've discovered our network, and created some network maps.
The next thing we are going to do is create some custom alerts and reports
and again, for more detailed help on NPM just check out the links below.