The Topology Viewer gives you an easy way to visualize your up-to-date network and to gather information about monitored network elements. To open the Topology Viewer, choose Topology from the menu bar.

To achieve the best results from the Topology Viewer, set up sites for your network infrastructure before viewing your topology. The Topology Viewer limits you to a display of 1,000 devices and 1,000 groups or fewer.

Grouping your infrastructure is a best practice for displaying your topology effectively. For more information, see “Creating, Cloning, Modifying, Deleting, and Manually Running Grouping Rules".

The Topology viewer also provide you with the means to quickly create, save, recall, and share custom topology views and layouts. You can:

The health indicators continue to display current health of Sites, Groups, Devices, Interfaces, and active alerts.

The following topics are included in this section.

The initial view, as shown in the following screen, displays top-level devices and site groups, and you can drill down to more information from there. In the following example, showing topology grouped by geography, “US” is a site group that contains other site groups (states). Within each state group are more site (city) groups. This is one way you might group your network elements.

Actions such as zoom and pan, and object selections persist for the duration of your NetIM session unless you reload the page in the web browser.

Mouse-over information is displayed for the interfaces, as shown in the following screen:

You can also drill down on the topology, by clicking on a site, as shown in the following screen in which America has been expanded:

To clear your Topology selections, use the Deselect All action. To return to the top-level (default) view, use the - icon in Topology controls.

For more information on stepping through a topology, see Topology Navigation

The available controls in the Topology Viewer provide you with ways to quickly navigate through your infrastructure, as well as to find more information. The following controls are described in this section.

Topology element controls let you show information, expand or collapse all groups, perform actions on select elements, filter elements, or open the AppNetwork Path interface. The following table describes each control.

 

The available actions for viewing the topology depend upon the object type and how many are selected.

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The available actions for a selected object depend upon the object type and how many are selected.

On the right-hand side of the Topology Viewer are display controls. These controls let you change the zoom level, print the display, refresh the display, and change the way you interact with the display, as follows:

The following table describes each control:

The Hierarchical layout defaults to a single layer, but you can define the layers and order and can set the hierarchical layout to be the default layout, as shown in the following screen:

The layers and default you set here also apply to a device’s Network Neighbors panel. The following example is a Hierarchical layout applied to a site topology with layers assigned as indicated in the screen:

The following same hierarchy is applied to the Network Neighbors panel:

You can also use the right-click menu to perform the same operations:

The Topology Viewer has a right-click menu option to “Select Incident Links/Devices.” This feature allows you to highlight a device’s connections, as follows:

You can then choose the option to “Show Selected Devices Only” to further focus on just the device and its immediate neighbors, as follows:

Additionally, the topology view’s mouse over tool-tip information can be selected and copy-pasted for reference in documents or presentations:

Link objects are selectable and have associated device and interface endpoint information in the information panel in the Topology Viewer, as shown in the following screen:

In addition to standard attributes, you can view custom attributes assigned to an object in the Object Details panel of the Topology Viewer, as follows:

When you navigate from the Topology Viewer and return to the Topology Viewer, the previous state is preserved including the state of the AppNetwork Path rendering.

You can select multiple sites or devices and then select Show Group Devices Only to view the selected set of devices in a schematic layout, as shown in the following screens:

You can save any edit you make and save any type of topology view, including hierarchical views, for later recall or sharing. You can also manage your views from the Topology Views page, as shown in the following screen:

In addition to the out-of-the-box default health and default alerts, NetIM allows you to provide your own parameterization for health and default alerts by using the Alerts Profile Page, which now has a Health check box for alert profiles that you can use for calculating health. For more information, see “Configuring an Alert“.

The Alerts wizard “Default Alert” and Default Thresholds page continue to control the default alerting and default health calculation. However, the default alerts are now on-crossing as opposed to continuous. This change from previous NetIM releases dramatically reduces the alert count through basic alert suppression and allows you to focus on “What things happened in the last hour” (or time scope of page).

While in the Topology Viewer, you are still monitoring the health of your network. Notice that the health of a group is indicated by the color of the border and the fill. The colors used are the same as the colors indicating health elsewhere in NetIM, making it familiar and easy to detect problems when they occur. In the example below, we are looking at the border for a group. “US_NH” is a group within the “US” group. Its green border indicates 100% health. However, notice that the selection border (blue), has a red border within, which indicates at least one of the objects within the US group is down. The group “US_CA” is red, meaning that the down object is contained in this group. The color of the container and border indicates the health of the least healthy object contained in a given group, as shown in the following screen:

From the site level, you can drill-down to get more health information about children of the parent group. For more information about health, see “Monitoring the Health and Status of Your Infrastructure".

Link coloring also indicates health. In the example shown below, a link from the “IL” group to the “US_MD” group is in a degraded state (yellow). Split health coloring is possible on the link, since each interface has its own health. In the example shown below, the health for the source interface in the IL group is degraded, while the destination interfaces are healthy. Notice the change from yellow to green, indicated by the arrows in the figure below.

When you select an object in your search results, you may choose Show Info, which works the same way as the Show Info button in the main Topology view, or you may choose Select. In the example below, we have selected a device in our search results and pressed Select. Notice that there is a badge on the site group “US_MD”, which indicates that our selection is contained within that site group. Next, we drill down until we find the device in a site group. The device is selected for us in the topology.

NetIM supports a Host object view page and drill-down to the connected device and connected interface.

To work with the Host view, follow these steps:

The Device page’s Collected Files tab has been re-architected and re-imagined to add additional functionality with a new, modern look-and-feel, as shown in the following screen:

The side-by- side comparison feature has also been enhanced to display how the changed lines are displayed, so you now have the option to view the configuration file differences line-by-line or view just the differences using the Show Differences Only option, as shown in the following screen:

The Topology Views page defaults to your saved views, which you can view, edit, or delete by selecting the eye, pencil or x icon under the Actions column. You can also delete a view by selecting a view and clicking on the hamburger menu.

At the top of the page, you can toggle the My Views radio button to the left, which will include global views in the display, as shown in the following screen: