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>>In this session we're going to show you
how to get up to speed with Network Configuration Manager,
also known as NCM.
This will be a basic overview of NCM's main features.
Most customers purchase NCM to manage backups
but there are many more features
that can help you begin to automate
your configuration management tasks.
The objective of this video is
to provide a better understanding of NCM's common features
and to demonstrate how these features
can be implemented to allow you
to become more proactive at addressing issues.
For the sake of time, we will assume
NCM has been installed
and that devices have been added for monitoring.
If you are new to SolarWinds products, I would suggest
watching the Orion Platform series videos
to get you familiar with common features,
such as reporting and alerting.
Let's login to the Orion web consol
and get acquainted with the information presented
in the NCM summary page.
Click on my dashboards and config summary.
What you are looking at is a collection of web resources,
each displaying different types of information.
These resources can be customized
by clicking edit on a resource
or to control which resources are displayed on this page,
you can go to customize page here.
Let's look at the node list resource.
This is where all your manage devices will appear.
The group by drop down menu allows you to sort the nodes
in an organized fashion.
I have mine grouped by vendor
in case I need to push updates to all devices
of a specific vendor.
If you need to access a device on the list,
you simply click and drill into the device.
This pulls up the device details page.
I'd like to focus on the configs tab.
The configs tab provides access to all the NCM centric data
for this device.
Below are several options for managing this device.
There's no need to use a separate tool
to download a configuration.
You can do that directly from the download config resource.
Just select the type of configuration you need
and click download.
Note that these tasks can also be done
on the configuration managing page.
You can execute a script,
or upload a configuration,
simply by selecting what you want,
and clicking upload.
On the right, you'll see the last five config changes.
If you want to see the last ten configuration changes,
just click edit on this resource
and enter the desired number.
The compare configs resource allows you to select
two configurations from different time periods
to compare to one another based on certain dates.
You could also run a config change report directly.
These reports display where changes are detected
and provide before and after columns,
which colors that designate the changes.
Let's go back to the summary page
and look at a helpful chart.
The overall devices backed up versus not backed up resource
provides a pie chart representing the percentage
of backed up versus not backed up devices,
over a specific period of time.
I have it set to the as of last update time frame.
This time frame is based on the last time an update occured
and any changed made there after.
An update occurs when you run inventory,
download configuration files,
or execute a baseline of your network.
The chart itself is interactive and clickable.
Let's take a look at the nodes that haven't been backed up.
By simply clicking into the chart,
you'll get a list of nodes.
Sometimes nodes don't have backups,
or the backups fail.
This could be happening for many reasons.
To find out why some of these devices
haven't been backed up,
we'll need to visit the configuration management feature.
To open the configuration management feature,
I'm going to click on my dashboards,
then configuration management.
When I click on the transfer status tab,
I can find out exactly why the backups were not completed,
by looking at the status/details column.
Also notice that there are suggested actions
to resolve the issue.
Another resource I would like to draw
your attention to on the summary page is the search feature,
which is very powerful.
It allows you to search for a specific text
within configurations on all or some of your managed nodes.
You can specify whether you want
to search all downloaded configuration files
or only the most recently downloaded ones.
You can also specify a date range within the past week,
the current month, the last month,
or specific dates.
You can also specify the type of configurations to search,
running, startup, or edited.
If you perform a search based on a specific keyword,
NCM will display the results with your keyword highlighted.
Clicking on a result will take you
to the config details page.
From here you can save the config to file
or edit it.
Let's talk about one of the main reasons people use NCM,
and that is for automated backups.
What we want to do is visit the jobs list to see
what jobs are currently scheduled.
By default, NCM backs up any nodes that you have added
using a TFTP copy running command.
All of the jobs that you see here come out of the box.
Some are already enabled by default,
including the nightly config backup job.
This out of the box job downloads
the configuration files for all nodes in the database
on a nightly basis.
By clicking edit, you can modify the example
for your specific needs.
Or you can create a new job by clicking create new job.
You simply name the job,
and select download configs from devices
from the job type drop down menu,
then select the schedule type.
If you're creating an advanced schedule,
enter the appropriate CRON expressions.
Add a comment if needed.
For example, this job relates to a business rule
and click next.
Select the nodes to target with this job,
and click next.
Select your e-mail notification option.
Most importantly select the configuration types
you want to download,
and then select the send config change notifications.
Review the settings for the job
and click finish.
Suppose you need to find a previous configuration file.
There are several ways
you can find an archived configuration.
Use the search feature,
particularly if you know specific details about the file,
or go to the nodes list and select the node.
You'll be presented with the most recent configurations
for the device.
Just select a configuration and then save to file.
You can also edit the configuration directly from here.
Before you do that,
you may want to do a configuration comparison
to ensure you have the correct file.
When you enable to the change approval system,
NCM prevents the system from executing device uploads
until the NCM administrator has approved the scheduled job.
Setting up the system is pretty straight forward.
You need to go into the NCM settings and go through
the setup wizard.
The wizard walks you through the types of approval modes.
A one-level approval,
a two-level mode for non-privileged users,
and a two-level mode for all users.
Select the desired level,
set up your e-mail server,
and configure your e-mail settings.
Finally, you need to ensure that the user rolls
have a web uploader status.
Click manage users, select the user role,
and then click edit.
Scroll down the page to the NCM settings,
and confirm that the role is enabled.
This confirms that the user account
will have future configuration changes approved.
If setting up an approval process
is not applicable in your environment,
yet you still want to be informed about changes
occurring to your devices,
you can enable the configuration change report
to be e-mailed to you.
Simply go to my dashboards and click jobs.
Now locate the example daily config change report.
This is the report you're going to edit to fit your needs.
This report comes out of the box with NCM.
Click edit.
You can change the title
and set up a schedule for your report.
Right now it's defaulted at 6:00 a.m..
Click next.
This is where you select the nodes
you want the report to run against.
Click next.
You'll want to verify that email results
is selected and that the sender
and recipient names are correct.
This is who will be getting the email report at 6:00 a.m..
Click next.
On the jobs specific details page,
you'll want to select the configuration type
to run the report against.
Select the configuration file by date to compare
against the most recently downloaded one.
You can select to show changed over the past number of days
or only changes made between certain time periods.
Most importantly, you can check this
if you only want to receive an email
about the devices that have had changes.
Click next to review and finish.
Next, you'll need to go back and select
a report from the list and enable it.
Now this report is scheduled.
Let's talk about another powerful feature.
The configuration management console.
This is where you do a majority of your tasks,
such as updating access lists,
modifying community strings,
or making other changes to multiple devices at once.
You'll see the manage nodes in the left hand column,
and you'll see the applicable actions
you can take on the selected nodes.
Just select the nodes you want to make changes to,
and then select an action.
You can either upload or download configurations,
compare them,
and even run a configuration change report.
Clicking the upload button allows you to run a command,
no CLI needed.
Just enter the command, and click upload.
NCM will ask you to confirm the action.
Once you've execute an action,
you can verify the results by
looking on the transfer status tab.
Scroll to the right and click show upload results.
Back on the config management tab,
you can take more actions,
such as executing a script,
by selecting a node, and then clicking execute script.
You can load a script from a file,
or paste one in and save it for future use.
You also have the option to execute script
in config mode or reboot the device if needed.
Again, as with any action,
NCM will ask you to confirm before continuing.
Inventory reports are a must have for compliance reporting
and needed for cisco smart advisor reports.
There is a free connector tool required for those reports.
You can choose from several unique inventory reports
or create your own.
NCM ships with many reports,
including Cisco Chassis IDs,
and Cisco iOS Image reports.
I'm going to search for inventory
to locate the iOS versions report.
Select it and click view report.
Here is a summary of all my cisco nodes
with IP addresses and iOS versions.
So, to wrap up our session,
we took a look at how to start using NCM
to automate some common everyday tasks,
and how NCM can help you to move
from having a reactive approach
to having a proactive approach,
with configuration management.
Here is a list of some best practices
that you can implement in your environment.
For more information on Network Configuration Manager,
please visit support.solarwinds.com.
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