We go through a lot of M&A activity. I'm currently working on 2 sites with 1600-ish nodes each. Nodes consist of routers, switches (mix of Cisco & HP), UPS, wireless controllers, etc
When we were new to Solarwinds 5 years ago, we were lucky in that we were coming from an existing platform where we had thought things out, had standardized SNMP community strings, standardized flexible SNMP ACLs and all devices already authenticating against our TACACS. As we've added a few smaller sites, we sometimes just fingerbone in their devices but these larger acquisitions have got me thinking about automating the process of getting the devices in shape to be managed by Solarwinds NCM & NPM.
I was wondering if anyone can share their experiences / other tools, scripting languages, etc that you used to do a fast & dirty 'groom' of the devices for import. Things like adding snmp community strings, adjusting snmp ACLs, etc so that SW can fully discover the devices upon import.
I had initially thought I could do it with NCM as I didn't have to have a correct SNMP string and could still telnet/ssh to the device in NCM and apply config. But the rub is that if the device isn't fully discovered then of course we don't know what device type, class, etc it is to know which code snippets can be applied. If I'm wrong here & we can handle it all within NCM then please straighten me out
My current work's spreadsheet is an export from an old Spectrum system and it does include the IP, device name, mfg, model, class and community.
I've considered looking at TCL scripting for the Cisco stuff or maybe rConfig and batch like models together..
Does this chicken & egg dilemma sound familiar at all ?
Thanks!