NPC Sites and Groups 5 of 7: UCMonitor Locations and SuperAgent Networks

Part of a series of posts.  To see all posts, click here.


UCMonitor Locations
As mentioned before, the relationship between NPC Sites and UCMonitor Locations should be a 1-to-1 relationship. Locations should be named the same way the locations are named in NPC. All that remains is to ensure that the networks that correspond to each site are added to each corresponding location.

UCMonitor locations can be imported via a CSV file. The syntax is described in the Installation Steps documentation and is shown below:

LOCATION,LocationName,Description,Key Phone IP Address
SUBNET,LocationName,SubnetName,SubnetIPAddress,Mask

SuperAgent Networks 
There have been several solutions published on the CA NetQoS User Community that detail different strategies and include tools for configuring networks in SuperAgent. With version 9.0 of SuperAgent, configuring applications and servers is no longer necessary (available but not necessary).

On the most basic level, the only configuration necessary to get SuperAgent up and running is a list of networks, with one or more of those network definitions designated as a ‘server subnet’. Given the subnets listed in the Sites/Networks list, this part should be easy. In the next post, I’ll talk about some of the shortcuts that can be used to simplify all these processes.

SuperAgent networks can be imported from a CSV file. The syntax is described in the AdminGuide and are shown below:

network_name,subnet,mask,regions,network_type

The description of each of the required parameters is shown below:

Parameter	Description
network_name (Required)	Specify the name of the network as you want it to appear in the SuperAgent Management console with a maximum length of 50 characters.
subnet (Required)	Specify the IPv4 address of the network in four-part, dotted-decimal notation, for example 192.168.100.0.
mask (Required)	Specify the subnet mask of the network by choosing a mask between /0 and /32.
regions (Optional)	Specify the number of sub-networks into which you want to divide the client network.
network_type (Optional)	Specify the network type using the existing network types you have configured in SuperAgent. If you do not specify a network type, it is set to Unassigned.

Table 3: SuperAgent Network CSV Syntax 

In SuperAgent, when configuring networks, it’s best to end up with networks specified down to 24 bits. SuperAgent counts ‘users’. However, it can only count one octet beyond the network definition. Therefore, if you want accurate ‘user’ counts, you’ll need to specify at least to /24. This means that any subnets that are larger than 24 should use the regions field to further split the network definition. The formula for determining the number of regions that will split a network into /24 subnets is as follows:

The maximum regions that can be used on one network definition is 256. Therefore, any networks larger than /16 will need to be parsed into /16 subnets using something like SolarWinds’ Advanced Subnet Calculator, then imported as individual subnets with 256 regions.

After importing the file, be sure to go back and specify which networks are server subnets.


To be continued...