Determine where to start.

Have you already installed and configured other SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted products?

• If this is your first SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted product, start with the tasks listed in the SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted Getting Started Guide, and then continue with this list.

• If you have already performed those tasks for one or more SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted products, continue with this list.

Add devices to NCM.

After you discover devices and add them to SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted for monitoring, identify the nodes whose configurations you want to manage with NCM.

Network devices include switches, routers, firewalls, and Windows servers. They are also called nodes.

Before you can use NCM to perform configuration management operations on a device, you must:

1. Add each device to NCM to make configuration management operations available for the device.

2. Specify the connection information that NCM will use to log in to the device and perform tasks such as downloading configurations, performing firmware upgrade operations, or running scripts. This information is stored in each device's connection profile.

Back up network configs.

• To ensure that network configs are backed up on a regular basis, use an NCM config backup job to automatically download configs at the specified interval (for example, nightly or weekly).

  The Nightly Config Backup job is enabled by default. It automatically downloads the config files for all devices every night. You can use this job to back up your configs, or you can create a custom backup job to meet the needs of your organization.

• You can also manually download a config from one or more devices at any time.

Downloaded configuration files are stored in the database and (optionally) in the config archive. NCM provides a default location for the config archive, but you can specify a different config archive location and adjust other configuration management settings as needed.

View config management information

Use the Config Summary dashboard to quickly identify potential issues, such as failed backups, firmware vulnerabilities, and policy violations.

Edit configuration files.

NCM provides multiple ways to edit configuration files:

• For config changes that do not require advanced logic, a script is the recommended way to update configurations on multiple devices. Scripts can be manually executed or scheduled. You can use scripts to automate changes to multiple configuration files.

  Examples of tasks that can be automated using scripts include uploading or downloading configuration files, updating login banners, and updating access control lists (ACLs).

• Config change templates can also be used to update configs on multiple devices. Config changes templates are based on a programming language that can be used to create sophisticated config change routines using conditional logic, control flow, and string and value comparison.

  Examples of tasks that can be automated using config change templates include changing VLAN membership by device port and configuring device interfaces based on description.

• You can also edit individual config files manually.

Identify changes to network configs.

• Configure real-time change detection to get instant notification through email whenever a change occurs to any of your device configurations.

• Establish a baseline to define the approved configuration for a set of devices and identify when a device config has deviated from the baseline. After a comparison runs, you can find devices whose configs do not match the baseline and review differences between baselines and configs.

Ensure policy compliance.

Use the NCM compliance policy reports to verify that network configs are comply to your organizations guidelines and to industry best practices. NCM provides preconfigured reports, and you can also create custom reports.