Heard of SolarWinds Intelligent Maps and never known where to start with them? You’re in luck! Join us as we chart a course……sorry I couldn’t resist! Let’s navigate through some topics….right, sorry – I have it out of my system now! Here is what you need to know.

If you have worked with SolarWinds for some time the name ‘Network Atlas’ might be a familiar one. This was a dedicated application provided by SolarWinds to create custom network maps. The tool was officially deprecated in version 2020.2 but has stuck around to allow maps to be migrated into the SolarWinds platform. We’ll look into this a little more below.

SolarWinds Intelligent Maps, which are entirely web-based,  provide a dynamic canvas that allows you to create a visual representation of your device’s topology and health. Here are a few examples of making these maps work for you.

Ready, Steady, Create!

From within SolarWinds, navigate to ‘My Dashboards > Home > Maps’. Here you will see any maps already created. You’ll also see options for creating new maps and importing maps from Network Atlas.

Selecting ‘New Map’ will load the canvas we spoke about earlier. Here is where the magic begins! Let’s quickly talk about what you can place on the map. Under ‘Entity Library’ over on the left, you can select from a HUGE list of categories such as Node, Application, Interface and many more. In our example, we are going to be selecting from Node. Now, I love a bit of drag and drop, so once you find your devices drag those over onto your canvas.

Remember that magic I spoke about? Well, if you have topology information being collected from your devices and you drag two devices that are known to be connected, you’ll see that reflected.

Let’s take it up a notch and add some other entity types to this map. As with many of our servers you likely have applications on them that need monitoring to ensure a reliable service is provided. Well, using our filters on the left, we can find those applications being monitored on one of our devices and drag them into view.

Once you have your entities on the map, you can begin customising how things look. Using the options on the right side of the canvas, we can change text, icons and even upload background images. That’s right folks! Want your devices to look as though they are being swallowed up by a sea creature whilst providing useful health metrics?!…..the world really is your oyster!

Another helpful feature on the right side is the ability to pull through polled values. With an entity selected, you can use the ‘content’ section to view the values that relate to your selected entity. You might want to pull through the IP address or the current CPU load as an example.

As I bring us into port, let me leave you with a few tips and tricks for using Intelligent Maps.

1. Make use of services like Google Maps or Map Quest to place your entities in their geographical location. You can do this by using a screen grab and uploading it as a background.
2. Once you have a map, why not add it to a Modern Dashboard for your colleague’s viewing pleasure? These work great for Service desks and managers to have a quick traffic light style glance at system health.
3. Find out more about Intelligent Maps from SolarWinds

Before there was “Network Operations” there were networks. Networks grew out of a need for connecting one box to another, sharing printers, and for more advanced users, files. These were simpler times and the care and feeding of networks was not well understood as a strategic business challenge. Remember networks were not a critical requirement in those early days, so resolving access problems to a shared printer was not a high priority task and it was usually handled by the telecom guys that took care of the desk phones. And the telecom team was also not well versed in choosing computing solutions, hardware or software. So as the personal computing technology advanced, resellers and distributors cut their teeth on providing these higher-tech solutions, advising their clients on the hundreds of choices of PCs, Printers and workgroup networking solutions available. Companies like us were setting the stage for our future… to position ourselves as a trusted advisor and helping our customers SELECT the best products to handle these forward-looking computing scenarios.

It’s probably also worth reminding everyone that channel providers like us would actually PREFER to be referred to as a “VAR” because it defines our core function as “Value-Added”. We don’t lead on price, we lead on value. We are experts in technology and help customers solve their current problems, doing the legwork to expose our clients to new proven solutions, and narrowing the available choices down for our customers, based on their specific unique requirements. We solve customers’ problems, sometimes before they know they should ask us to…

So is the case for NetBrain®. While many of our customers have grown their networks over time, in both scope and scale, they are now finding an overwhelming burden with keeping their cloud-to-edge network up and running, responding to hundreds or thousands of end-user and application delivery needs every month. Interestingly, many of the network operations people we meet know that the problem of handling network operations at scale is a critical issue, but they are unaware that there is a solution to the problem. And that’s OUR job, as a Trusted Advisor, to bring strategic new offerings to the table, such as NetBrain, that addresses network operations scale issue.

So we were thrilled when NetBrain introduced their latest Problem Diagnosis Automation System (PDAS). It solves the problem that we KNOW every one of our customers has, but there was simply no answer to- until PDAS! In a nutshell, NetBrain has been known for almost 20 years as the industry’s most comprehensive dynamic mapping solution. Thousands of customers use NetBrain today to capture their edge-to-cloud topology, and then dynamic trace traffic paths and performance across that infrastructure. PDAS builds upon that network model by adding easy to consume Network Automation, the way it has always been imagined to be. It integrates with ITSM systems such as ServiceNow, and addresses three key problems that exist at scale:

1. Acceleration of network service tickets to reduce MTTR and reduce risk.
2. Proactively identifying network abnormalities before the condition affects network production.
3. Hybrid network visibility, from edge to cloud, including the ability to see traffic flows in real-time.

Imagine finding network problems before they cause a network failure and a ton of user complaints. Human error and other failures happens all the time, so finding those problems early is ideal. And imagine reducing your network service ticket times from 8 hours to 2 hours simply by automating all of the triage and network diagnostics and leveraging your subject matter experts experience which has been captured, ready to be re-used by anyone. Those saved hours are also measures of risk and downtime, so reducing the duration of every network service ticket will have a huge impact on the business aspects of your IT service delivery strategy.

PDAS is a keeper and we are happy to put our name on bringing it to customers. It’s easy to use, supports all of the infrastructure already in place, include the cloud providers, and it even comes with a pre-built (and growing) automation library of the most common diagnostics needed to address the vast majority of network service tickets along with the most common types of proactive situations that aren’t visible until it’s too late (i.e. HA pairs that are out of alignment).

Trusted advisor is not just a title, it’s a strategic role and we take it seriously. We would be thrilled to show now NetBrain’s PDAS can be used to power the core of your network service delivery function.

In this webinar, you will discover how SolarWinds® is evolving to deliver complete infrastructure visibility. This webinar examines how to extend visibility across your IT infrastructure using the SolarWinds observability platform. Discover how the new tiered subscription model will help you scale up your IT management capabilities and how Prosperon can help you move to the SolarWinds observability platform.

What you will learn on this webinar:

• Modular Monitoring Vs. Complete IT Infrastructure Visibility: Go beyond single-point monitoring to deliver visibility & simplify management across your infrastructure.
• New Simple Tiered SolarWinds Subscription Licensing Model: Explore how the new tiered subscription model is more cost-effective and scalable to your needs.
• Making The Move To The SolarWinds Observability Platform: Learn how Prosperon can help facilitate your move to SolarWinds observability platform.

SolarWinds® Network Configuration Manager (NCM) delivers a continuous auditing tool to automate the configuration compliance checks, within its common web UI, alongside the health, performance and utilisation monitoring function it is known so well for. When the configuration compliance feature is configured, it will run daily search on device configurations backups to spot noncompliant setting and make you aware of configuration divergences in the form of Policy Report.

Having such functionality provided alongside the monitoring data allows for very quick impact visibility and identification if configuration issues are the cause of the status or performance issue the monitoring metrics indicate, which we all know is a very common circumstance.

Orion® NCM comes with 169 Compliance Reports pre-built across common compliance frameworks, such as PCI, SoX, as well as vendor ‘best practice’ based reports, this is a great starting point. However, I always discuss with our clients the importance of creating your own company policy reports in NCM. Every organisation should have a common configuration definition across similar devices, for example if you run devices from a few vendors, it is likely you will have only a few network operating systems to create reports for. Knowing all your devices are correctly configured to support a common authentication definition, or sending standard logging to a specific destination is just a couple of examples of the importance of validating configuration definition is in place across all of your device infrastructure.

Policy Reports can be displayed on SolarWinds Orion GUI or sent by email on schedule. Each Policy Report includes one or more policies, while each Policy also includes one or more Rules.

A rule defines a condition that must or must not exist. The condition can be a string search, or a Regex pattern, or even a mix of a few string searches and Regex patterns.

When set condition in Rule, multiple config searches can be used to cater for all situations. For example, when checking ACL rules, we can search if all standard ACL rules exist. At the same time, config searches can be created to find out if there is any non-standard ACL defined. This ability to look for configuration that exists that shouldn’t is a powerful and often missed capability, which extends the benefit this feature provides.

Case Study
Take the following standard ACL rules, which we want to validate are in the configuration of all of our Cisco devices:

[code]access-list 1 permit 10.0.0.10
access-list 1 permit 10.0.1.20
access-list 1 permit 10.0.2.30
access-list 1 deny any log[/code]

Within the Rule definition, we have provided below the definition to confirm that the above configuration exists on our Cisco devices, which the NCM Policy Report will flag any uncompliant devices, so you can review and resolve.

A policy groups related rules, and specifies which nodes the rules apply to. Dynamic selection of nodes is also possible. For example:

A policy report groups together multiple policies. With regular configuration backups being taken from the devices by NCM, with real time and once a day our recommendation, the Compliance Report feature scans this latest device configuration and matches against all Rules looking for any new compliance breaches. Colour coded icons are used in the report represent pass or different level of violation. Hovering over each violation icon displays details of the violation, and what rule was violated.

Top Tip: Create a new report and populate it will existing rules and add your own rules to complete your report. The out of the box rules are a fabulous starting point to build something aligned to how you want to have your network configured.

In this webinar, you will discover how to extend your monitoring visibility beyond the network with SolarWinds® Server & Application Monitor, Netflow Traffic Analyser, Network Configuration Manager, and User Device Tracker. This webinar examines how to monitor your complete IT environment with additional SolarWinds Orion® modules. Discover how to accelerate mean-time-to-resolution by diving deeper into performance metrics and make better business decisions.

What you will learn on this webinar:

• Go Beyond SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor: Explore how to monitor your complete IT environment with SolarWinds’ modular approach to IT monitoring.
• Resolve Issues Faster By Diving Deeper Into Metrics: Discover how to speed up troubleshooting by zooming in on problems or zooming out for the big picture.
• Base Business Decisions On Accurate Monitoring Data: Examine how IT monitoring data can assist the decision-making beyond the IT department.

In this webinar, you will discover how to prove the value of network automation to your organisation with a value automation assessment workshop. This webinar examines how to overcome traditional NetOps challenges by automating manual, time-consuming and repetitive NetOps tasks. Discover how to improve key NetOps performance metrics using automation and explore how to quantify the value of and accelerate automation adoption.

What you will learn on this webinar:

• The Cost Of Not Automating Network Operation Tasks: Explore the value associated with not automating manual, time-consuming and repetitive NetOps tasks.
• Supercharge Network Operations With Automation: Discover how network automation can simplify network troubleshooting, mapping and documentation, change management and network security threat mitigation.
• Examine The True Value Of Automation To Your Business: Identify how automating traditional network operations tasks can benefit your organisation with a free automation value assessment workshop from NetBrain.

In this webinar, you will discover how to resolve network issues faster using network automation, by integrating SolarWinds® with NetBrain® – the leader in Network automation. This webinar examines how to visualise your network and simplify documentation with dynamic maps that provide critical and contextualised IT data. Discover how to accelerate troubleshooting using runbooks to automate vital diagnostics steps; and easily streamline critical IT tasks using workflow integrations with your existing ticketing and monitoring solutions.

What you will learn on this webinar:

• Create On-demand Dynamic Maps Of Your Network: Learn how to go beyond static network diagrams. Use on-demand mapping that provides end-to-end visibility, and one-click drill down into infinite detail, contextualised to the task at hand.
• Automate Network Troubleshooting Diagnostics Steps: Discover how to easily identify the root cause of network problems and automate repetitive troubleshooting tasks using runbooks – automatically executed step-by-step diagnostic procedures.
• Leverage Powerful Network Workflow Integrations: Explore how to enhance workflows by integrating ticketing solutions (such as ServiceNow®) with SolarWinds to trigger NetBrain to collect, analyse and visualise critical network data.
• Live Product Demonstrations & Q&A Session: A Senior Engineer will demonstrate the benefits of SolarWinds and NetBrain working together.

Across industries, enterprise network architects are adding new agility and flexibility to their network infrastructure stacks through public cloud technologies like Amazon Web Services® (AWS) and Microsoft® Azure® Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings. While the benefits of network elasticity, cost savings, and capex avoidance are relatively well understood, NetOps professionals often struggle with managing and automating the operations and troubleshooting of cloud environments synchronously with the physical environments under their watch. Multi-cloud environments only add to this struggle.

Perhaps this sounds surprising as cloud services are often portrayed as turnkey. And as true as that may be, public cloud environments cannot live in a bubble in your network stack and be effective. These environments, often comprised of multiple clouds (known as multi-cloud), must play well with the entirety of the network infrastructure, and NetOps must understand how multi-cloud supports mission-critical business applications, and thus, business objectives. In reality, multi-cloud can introduce unexpected complexity to NetOps professionals who may have little training in the nuances of running cloud-based networks.

The resultant heterogenous networks resulting from multi-cloud adoption are here to stay. Whereas NetOps professionals are likely able to leverage years of experience with CLI to troubleshoot and automate traditional networks, they don’t have this option in multi-cloud environments. As a result, NetOps does not have the same exposure to data about interference, condition of resources, CPU capacity, and memory that they would in a traditional environment. Further, without a centralized platform, NetOps lacks standardized network data. This leads to problems in several critical areas:

• Validation and verification. Disjointed visibility planes in the network stack mean difficulty for validation and verification of network processes.
• Similarly, siloed NetOps environments create visibility gaps that make it hard to ensure protocol compliance on the network.
• Visualizing network boundaries. NetOps must be able to visualize the boundaries between public cloud environments and other topologies and technologies, understanding where different applications are being sourced and the paths that they must travel to ensure business outcomes. You need unified visibility spanning the WAN, LAN, traditional datacenters, and public cloud environments, encompassing physical, virtual, and software-defined infrastructure.
• Ecosystem Integration. Lastly, IT operations is an ecosystem of tools and data, telemetry and analytics, all critical to maintaining uptime and SLAs. Today’s drive to multi-cloud adds even more data and more tools for operations teams such as cloud native monitoring tools, logging and billing systems, and service analytics tools. Pulling in the right data for the right problem with the inherently disjointed nature of multi-cloud poses challenges for front line teams. Uniting such diverse forms of IT data into a single end-to-end view is critical for multi-cloud network efficiency.

Visualizing network boundaries is a great first step, but that alone is not enough. NetOps needs to transcend those boundaries not just through visibility, but also with the ability to automate operations across the network. A scalable, extensible network automation platform can help eliminate the learning curve and potential silos that public cloud adoption brings. This allows NetOps to keep shifting workloads to the left and allow senior network engineers to focus on the increasingly important work of aligning the network to evolving digital business objectives.

Here’s a typical workflow for responding to an IT event — for example, a slow application:

• Enterprise NetOps teams typically have an event console like SolarWinds or Splunk that’s listening to the network to detect any anomalies that are occurring. Or, a user may call the help desk using a ticketing system like ServiceNow or BMC Remedy for incident management.
• The trouble ticket is then addressed by a tier 1 engineer who tries to diagnose and resolve the issue by digging through the CLIs of all the devices in the affected segment.
• If they can’t solve the problem, it is escalated to somebody with more experience. Unfortunately, since information is rarely shared, the new network engineer will do the same CLI commands to diagnose the issue, duplicating efforts.
• Then there’s the remediation: the actual change or fix, which will hopefully be documented for sharing. And finally, in an ideal world, the teams review what’s happened to see how they can do better next time during a postmortem analysis.

So, the question is, “What can we do to shift this workflow to the left?” Because as this workflow progresses and the issues escalate, the teams involved get more and more expensive.

• How can basic tier 1 engineering tasks be automated?
• How can first-level engineers take on more advanced troubleshooting?
• How can teams democratize lessons learned from each troubleshooting event to do better next time or even prevent issues from happening?

By applying scalable network automation, the incident response workflow can be shifted to the left – with tier 1 engineers addressing more complex issues much faster and more experienced engineers sharing their knowledge to accelerate troubleshooting while allowing them to focus on more complex network issues.

Automation is leveraged in each step of this workflow; from the moment an event is detected all the way through postmortem analysis. The goal is to reduce mean time to repair (MTTR) and make more effective use of every member of the operations teams during this response.

What you will learn on this webinar:

• Build Powerful, Responsive Custom Dashboards: Discover how to get a greater level of flexibility over dashboard data display using the new grid-based layout, drag and drop placement, full vertical and horizontal widget scaling, and more.
• Enhance Dashboard Views With New Powerful Widgets: Explore how to improve your dashboard views using four new widgets, including: the KPI widget, the Proportional widget, the Table widget, and the Timeseries widget.
• Improve Reporting With Real-Time Data Intelligence: Learn how to troubleshoot faster and make better decisions by using dashboards that are automatically kept up-to-date without the need to refresh pages.
• Live Demonstrations & Q&A Session: A Senior SolarWinds Engineer will demonstrate modern dashboards, with examples of dashboards that can be created.