Documentation forUser Device Tracker
Monitoring users, devices, and ports is a key capability of Hybrid Cloud Observability and is also available in a standalone module, User Device Tracker (UDT). Hybrid Cloud Observability and UDT are built on the self-hosted SolarWinds Platform.

Introduction to UDT

SolarWinds User Device Tracker (UDT) monitors the devices, ports, and users associated with your network. It lets you analyze port use and capacity, and be alerted to issues before or as soon as they occur, find where devices are connected in your network and get detailed information about capacity analysis.

UDT regularly polls switches and routers for information about what is connected to them. Based on this information, it creates a database of current and historical information about where a device has been connected.

UDT polls Active Directory domain controllers event logs for user login activity, and based on this provides current and historical views of endpoints to which users have been connected on the network.

UDT cannot be used to monitor nodes that are monitored by the SolarWinds Platform Remote Collector.

What SolarWinds UDT offers

SolarWinds UDT provides focused device and port monitoring for network engineers. SolarWinds UDT provides many features to help, including:

  • Discover IPv4 and IPv6 devices
  • Quickly find where a device or user is connected on the network
  • Find out where a device or user has been connected in the past
  • Find out what has been connected to a port over time
  • Provides port capacity analysis for a switch (how many ports are being used, including both monitored and unmonitored ports)
  • Provides global port capacity analysis for used/available ports and network capacity planning
  • Configure a watch list to track when specific devices appear on the network and alert when the devices appear
  • Provides enhanced network topology mapping
  • Generates predefined reports on connected devices, device capacity, and Active Directory users

What is a device?

A device is referenced by its MAC address, hostname, or IP Address. You can use SolarWinds UDT to search on this information to find where the device is currently connected to the network and where it has been connected in the past.

How does SolarWinds User Device Tracker work?

Using SNMP calls to your network framework, SolarWinds User Device Tracker uses SNMP calls to your network framework to provide real-time feedback on your monitored devices. users, and trends through statistics stored in the SolarWinds Platform database. Keeping with the SolarWinds common components infrastructure, no agents are installed on your servers and there is no remote software to maintain. All calls are made in real time and displayed on a web console accessible from any supported browser.

The following diagram provides an overview of the current SolarWinds UDT architecture, including interactions among SolarWinds UDT components, the SolarWinds UDT database, Active Directory domain controllers, and the managed devices on your network.