Re: Unknown Location of Network Devices

I also agree.  The "location" property is polled via snmp.  Rather than go back to all the devices and have the node owners update the location field to a standardized format, we took a different path.

1. create a custom property named something related to location. We used "building" but you could use whatever you want.
2. Make a drop-down lost for the custom property that matches what you (from a monitoring POV) consider locations.  An added benefit here is people can't put typos in the custom property which will later bust your reporting or alerting.
3. Bulk update the custom property. ie: all nodes on the 192.168.1.0 subnet are in the "main building"
4. Write an alert directed at yourself that trips whenever a node has an "unknown" value in the custom property.
5. Completely ignore the location field in the future. You've now made it irrelevant.

This really helps us when managing 10,000+ nodes in Orion

As an added exercise (and this is what we did) do the following:

1. Create a database that has the following fields
   1. building name (this matches the custom property we used above)
   2. low address
   3. high address
2. Populate the database with all the buildings and address spaces you know of.
3. Write some code that does the following:
   1. for each node in Orion
      1. Find the smallest subnet in the database that it fits into
      2. Update the custom property with the name of the subnet (building)

And a final exercise:

1. Write some code that does the following:
   1. for each of the subnets (buildings) that are in the database
      1. check if Orion is running a discovery on that subnet
         1. if no discovery is configured, email yourself a reminder to build a discovery.