Getting the Most Out of NetIM
This section describes some common workflows and best practices for using SteelCentral NetIM, and consists of the following topics:
Common Workflows for NetIM
The primary purpose of NetIM is to let you continuously monitor your infrastructure and quickly troubleshoot problems that may occur. The following image map describes the high-level workflows for each top-level menu:
Best Practices
The following sections describe best practices when using NetIM.
Create Sites/Groups
Because NetIM is centered around aggregation of infrastructure information, one of the first things you should do is create sites and groups. Views within NetIM, such as the Topology Viewer, use sites and groups to represent large amounts of data.
The Topology Viewer has a limit of 1,000 visible devices. If you try to display a network that has more than 1,000 devices, you will see an error. The solution is to use grouping to limit the devices displayed in a view to less than 1,000. In the example below, notice that we only have two sites at the top level, but we have discovered 70 devices and 2,995 interfaces. The view is clean and easy to read, but you have not lost any information. You simply drill down to more specific groups of devices and interfaces to find the information you want to see. Sites can be hierarchical. Notice in the example that we have US and Default Site. Each site has more sites within it
For more information on using the
Topology Viewer, see
Navigating Topology.
Poll Only the Objects You Want to Monitor
Polling adds traffic to your network and can write a large amount of information to your database. By polling only the objects and metrics you want to track, you can reduce unnecessary stress on your resources.
For more information on polling, see
Configuring Metric Polling.
Model Your Network with Synthetic Testing
Synthetic testing is a way of simulating network traffic for a particular use case, to better understand how the network would perform under specific circumstances and identify potential problem areas that can be addressed before they impact your SLA.
