NPC Sites and Groups 2 of 7: Building the Sites/Networks List

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Before any thought can be dedicated to configuring the products, a good Sites/Networks list should be compiled. The Sites/Networks list should represent the smallest building blocks for reporting groups. Ideally, if you wanted to report on anything smaller than one of these sites, you’d report on an individual device or poll instance.

This list may already exist in some form or another. You’ll probably need to clean it up a bit. Whether you start over fresh or take an existing list and clean it up, you should have a list similar to the one shown below. Columns could be added to the right to include metadata about the site like Line of Business or Regional membership. This information is not required to implement this best practice, but can help when filling out other groups. The information I’ve provided below will be used as an example throughout this document and should hopefully exemplify most of the complex situations possible in corporate networks.

Site Name	Network	Line of Business	Region
New York	10.1.0.0/16	Sales Office	NA
Los Angeles (Bldg 1)	10.2.0.0/16, 10.3.0.0/16	Corporate	NA
Los Angeles (Bldg 2)	10.4.0.0/16, 10.5.0.0/16, 172.16.1.0/24	Corporate, Sales Office, Data Center	NA
London	10.100.0.0/16	Sales Office	EMEA
Singapore	10.150.0.0/16, 192.168.150.0/24	Sales Office	APAC

Table 1: Raw Sites List

Now that the sites list is compiled, it needs to be cleaned up a bit. The Los Angeles site is actually two sites. Also, Bldg 2 of the Los Angeles site is comprised of three different network segments, each serving a different line of business (LOB). I recommend treating each of these network segments as separate locations. Most reporting will want to segregate data center operations from the corporate network infrastructure monitoring. Also, since Corporate and Sales are two different LOB’s, splitting them into different sites will allow easier reporting by LOB later on. After cleaning up the raw Sites/Networks list, we end up with the list shown below:

Site Name	Network	Line of Business	Region
New York	10.1.0.0/16	Sales Office	NA
Los Angeles (Bldg 1)	10.2.0.0/15	Corporate	NA
Los Angeles (Bldg 2 - Corp)	10.4.0.0/16	Corporate	NA
Los Angeles (Bldg 2 - Sales)	10.5.0.0/16	Sales Office	NA
Los Angeles (Bldg 2 - DC)	172.16.1.0/24	Data Center	NA
London	10.100.0.0/16	Sales Office	EMEA
Singapore	10.150.0.0/16, 192.168.150.0/24	Sales Office	APAC

Table 2: Final Sites/Networks List

You’ll notice that I’ve added to the names of Bldg 2 to make them unique. Also notice that I’ve simplified the network definition for Bldg 1 since the two subnets were consecutive and could be summarized using a smaller subnet mask.

To be continued...