Overview

The Overview tab displays metric data collected from all monitored network devices over the selected time period.

Overall Health

A health score provides real-time insight into the overall health and performance of your monitored entities. The health score is calculated based on anomalies detected for the entity, alerts triggered for the entity's metrics, and the status of the entity. The health score is displayed as a single numerical value that ranges from a Good (70-100) to Moderate (40-69) to Bad (0-39) distinction. To view individual monitored network devices and their details in the Entity Explorer, click the widget title or click the vertical ellipsis in the upper-right corner of the widget and select View all network devices.

Health Distribution

A graph displaying the number of network devices in individual health score categories over the selected time period.

Active Alerts

An overview of the active alerts triggered by network devices, categorized by severity. Active alerts are alerts that have been triggered but not cleared. This includes acknowledged alerts. For more information about the entity's active alerts, click the widget title or click the vertical ellipsis () in the upper-right corner of the widget and click View All Active Alerts.

Overall Health for device groups

Review the health status for all devices or device type groups, such as routers, switches, wireless controllers, or firewalls.

The All Devices tile lists all monitored network devices, by default in the List View.

• To only display specific devices, use Vendor, Machine Type, or Location filters. Click the filter icon and specify what devices should be displayed.
• To find a specific device, type a name or a tag into the search field.
• To switch to Grid View, click the Grid View icon next to the search field.
• To group devices in the Grid View, select an item in the Group by drop-down list. You can group devices by vendor, location, machine type, device type, or display all devices in one widget (Group by: None).

Device type tiles, such as Router, Switch, Wireless Controller, SD-WAN, ...

• Click a device type tile to filter the displayed data. Network Overview filtered by a device type shows a Grid View of devices of the selected type, such as routers, switches, or firewalls.
• Use available filters and search options. Within the selected device type, you can also group and sort the devices.

Group network devices within a device type group

In the Group by drop-down, select what you want to group the displayed health score data by:

• Vendor: The widgets display health score for the selected group of devices, filtered by vendor, such as Cisco or Juniper Networks, Inc.
• Location: The widgets display health score for the selected group of devices, filtered by location.
• Machine type: The widgets display health score for the selected group of devices, filtered by machine type, such as Cisco 7206 VXR, or Palo Alto Networks PA-200 series firewall.

Sort network devices within a device type group

In the Sort by drop-down, select how the data should be sorted:

• Name ascending - health score groups are sorted alphabetically, starting with A down to Z
• Name descending - health score groups are sorted alphabetically, starting with Z down to A
• Health score ascending - health score groups with the greatest number of devices in bad state are displayed first, followed by health score groups with the highest number of devices in moderate state and then health score groups with devices in good state. Devices with unknown health score are not taken into account.
• Health score descending - health score groups with the greatest number of devices in good state are displayed first, followed by moderate health score, ending with bad state.

Discovered

The Discovered tab is only displayed for Network Collector 2024.2.10. If you cannot see the tab, upgrade your collector.

The Discovered tab shows all discovered entities (network devices or hosts) on a connected Network Collector with their status:

• Imported: Entities that are already monitored.

• Found: Entities that were discovered and are not monitored yet.

• Changed: Entities with new elements, such as interfaces or volumes, discovered.

Click an entity to display more details, such as a list of discovered interfaces, volumes, or other discovered elements (highlighted with a plus icon).

Use filters to filter discovered entities by their properties, such as status, machine type, or discovery profile.

Select the new or updated entities you want to monitor and click Import.

Diagnostics

The Diagnostics tab consists of two subtabs.

• Click PERFSTACK to see a list of custom analysis dashboards in your organization. See Create custom analysis dashboards.

• Click NetPath to see paths to endpoints defined in your organization. See Monitor critical network paths (NetPath).

Topology

The Topology tab provides a map where you can easily view and troubleshoot issues on a map representing your Layer 2 and Layer 3 interconnected network devices and servers.

Click Network > Topology to see all nodes in your organization on an auto-generated map. By default, network devices are grouped by the Network Collector used to monitor them. On Topology, you can do the following activities.

Zoom in/zoom out

Zoom in to focus on problematic parts of your network environment.

See devices monitored by a Network Collector

Double-click on a group to see devices monitored by the collector and their connections to the rest of the environment. Devices are surrounded by a dashed line. The line color reflects the worst device health score in the group.

Double-click an expanded group to collapse it again.

Filter out or search for what you want to see

Click the filter icon to display available filters. You can filter out devices with a specific health score, with alerts of specific severity, L2 or L3 connections, devices of a specific vendor or devices available in a location.

Use the search bar to search for network devices by an attribute and value.

Group network devices

Use the Group by options in the top right to group devices by the Network Collector which gathers information about the devices, device location, or vendor.

Drag and drop

You can move nodes on the canvas. Connections between the nodes adjust automatically.

Review health score of network devices

The color of the hexagons reflects the health score of the devices. See Entity health score for details.

Selected devices are highlighted with a circle and all their connections are highlighted.

Display tooltips with basic details

Hover over a network device to display more details in a tooltip. Hovering over a device also highlights its connections to other devices.

Hover over a dot on a connection to display bandwidth and utilization of the connection in a tooltip.

Click network devices or connections to learn more

Click a network device to highlight its connections to other devices and to display more details in the Inspector Panel.

Click a connection to display information on endpoints and about the connection in the Inspector Panel. Each connection shows the connection statuses of interfaces on both sides of the connection (if available) - Out traffic in Mbps, Out utilization as a percentage, In traffic in Mbps and In utilization as a percentage

Out traffic is calculated as the sum of all out current traffic of interfaces on the node that are connected to the corresponding node on the other side of connection.

Click a shadow node to highlight connections to an unmonitored node. Clicking a connection only provides information available for monitored nodes.

Review devices with alerts

If a device hexagon has an additional status icon (critical, warning, or info), it means that there is an alert with the specified severity triggered for the device. If there are more alerts, the highest severity is reflected in the icon.

Right-click network devices to see more details on the device, its neighbors, or alerts

Right-click a device and select:

Flows

If you collect NetFlow on your devices, the following metrics can be displayed in the Flows area overview. Metrics are collected from all observed entities, based on the Orion.Netflow.Flows.Bytes metric. See Add a network device.

Top Protocols

A donut chart displaying the protocols used most for traffic on your monitored network.

Top Countries

A donut chart displaying the countries hosting endpoints that transmit the most data over your monitored network.

Top Endpoints

An area chart of the monitored endpoints that are producing the most traffic on your monitored network.

Top Conversations

An area chart displaying most bandwidth-consuming conversations conducted over your monitored network.

Top Applications

An area chart displaying the top applications responsible for monitored traffic on your network, ranked in order of traffic volume.

Top Advanced Applications

An area chart displaying the top applications recognized through NBAR2 responsible for monitored traffic on your network, ranked in order of traffic volume.

Top Flow Sources

Top ten devices which send flow data to SolarWinds Observability. Click the link in the Name column to go to the device details view.

Flow filters

Starting with Network Collector 2022.4, you can filter flow data to display only communication inside the organization, communication outside of the organization, or all flow data. Select an option in the Traffic Direction filter. See Flow filters for details.

• All traffic: All flow data is displayed in the charts.

• East/West: Only flows from within the organization are displayed.

• North/South: Only flows regarding communication outside of the organization are displayed.

VLANS

If you add VLANs for monitoring in your Network Collector Web Console, the Network area overview includes a VLANS tab with a list of all VLANs on devices monitored in SolarWinds Observability.

Click a VLAN to see more details, such as the VLAN state, name, and the network device that hosts it.

Click the expanded VLAN to display the Inspector Panel with more details about the device, such as IP address, machine type, machine vendor, health score, average response time, CPU utilization, memory utilization, availability, or packet loss.

Click a network device to go to the network device details view where you can see more details in the VLANS tab. See VLANS.

Load Balancers

If you add F5 Load Balancers for monitoring in your Network Collector Web Console, the Network area overview includes a Load Balancers tab with the load balancing overview. Individual items are displayed as color-coded hexagons.

Hexagon color reflects the entity status:

• Up
• Warning
• Down
• Unmanaged
• Unreachable
• Unknown

The Load Balancers tab includes the following groups:

F5 services

This group lists F5 service nodes. You can monitor the nodes' State, Status reason, Role, and Requests per second (number of incoming requests that F5 load balancer can process within a one-second time frame). Click a hexagon to see details for the service node in the Inspector Panel.

F5 Global Traffic Managers

Global Traffic Managers distribute incoming client requests across multiple data centers or server pools to ensure efficient utilization of resources. Click a hexagon to see details for the global traffic manager in the Inspector Panel.

F5 Local Traffic Managers

Local Traffic Managers intelligently distribute incoming client requests across a pool of servers based on various factors such as server health, server capacity, and application-specific rules. Click a hexagon to see details for the local traffic manager in the Inspector Panel.

F5 Virtual Servers

Virtual servers act as a front-end entry point that receives incoming network traffic and distributes it to the appropriate back end servers based on predefined rules and configurations. Click a hexagon to see details for the virtual server in the Inspector Panel.

F5 Pools

Pools are collections of back-end servers or resources that share a common purpose or provide the same application or service. Click a hexagon to see details for the pool in the Inspector Panel.

F5 Pool Members

Pool members are individual back-end servers or resources that are part of a pool within a load balancer configuration. Click a hexagon to see details for the pool member in the Inspector Panel.