Diagrams with network/virtual topologies, now generally available

[Julien_P]

UPDATED POST (June 14th, 2023) - Diagrams are out of Preview and now generally available.

Hi everyone!

Lansweeper is pleased to introduce a significant enhancement to our IT Asset Management platform that will give you a fresh perspective on visualizing your IT estate. Today, I’m excited to announce our new diagramming capabilities to our esteemed customers and partners. Now in general availability, Diagrams is designed to offer a new angle and enhanced visualization options for your inventory.

At Lansweeper, we recognize the importance of gaining a comprehensive understanding of your IT assets, and we understand that interpreting the complexities of your IT infrastructure can be challenging. That's why we have developed a robust set of diagramming tools and templates that will allow you to explore your IT estate from a fresh perspective, enabling data-driven decisions and improved technology management.

An experience shaped by your feedback

But first, I would like to take a moment to express our sincere appreciation to the remarkable individuals who have played a vital role in shaping our product over the past months. I am referring to our dedicated testers and Community users, whose invaluable feedback has been instrumental in our journey of continuous improvement.

During the Beta and Preview phase, we had the privilege of receiving insightful feedback from you. We actively listened to your experiences, learned from your suggestions, and eagerly incorporated your insights into our development process. Your dedication and commitment have been truly exceptional.

Thanks to this valuable contribution, we are proud to announce the launch not only of the features previewed last January, but also of a set of enhanced tools that will enable our users to go even further. These diagramming capabilities will hopefully enable you to explore and understand your IT estate more easily and deeply. So thank you all!

Visualize your IT assets with network/virtual topologies

In addition to lists, reports, and dashboards, the diagramming and mapping capabilities in Lansweeper Sites enhance your experience of understanding the state of your inventory and allow you to discover the relations between your assets with dynamically generated diagrams.

Network topologies

See at a glance the different elements of your network and their relationships. Network topologies focus on the components of your computer or telecommunications network, including firewalls, devices, and routers.

 

Virtual environments

Navigate through the virtual resources available in your inventory, such as hypervisors and virtual machines, reorganized into logical groupings (data centers, clusters, etc.) to help you understand your virtual estate.

Of course, relations!

Let Lansweeper help you understand the connections between your assets with different types of automatically discovered relationships (SNMP, WMI) and those you’ve created manually in your inventory. Get valuable insights on your relationships to better understand the configurations applied to your network.

A set of features to discover

• With the integrated search, find your assets by their Name, IP address, MAC address, or Asset Type
• Define the diagram you want using filters, by Asset types, IP address (IP locations, IP range), or State
• Look at your assets from different angles with preconfigured layouts (Star, Tree)
• Get an overview of your Orphan assets, for which no relationship has been detected
• Create relations without leaving your diagram
• Export your diagram in JPG, PNG or SVG
• Get insights from your assets (details, issues, running status) and relations (speed, relation type, information port)
• Explore usability capabilities such as expanding/collapsing groups and personalization
• And a few more that we let you discover by yourself 😎
  
  

Where to start?

It's time for us to share these new capabilities with you. We hope these diagrams will give you a new perspective on your inventory. Check out our new Diagrams section in the Knowledge Base to learn how to master your new tools.

Please note that the diagrams are based on your inventory synched in Lansweeper Sites. Ensure that your installations are properly configured and synchronized so that your diagrams show up-to-date data. Additionally, the necessary SNMP credentials must be added to your installation to facilitate the discovery of relationships between your assets.

Finally, we're all ears! Your feedback is valuable, and we'd love to hear it. Feel free to share in the comments 👀.

[Julien_P]

Hi @rader,

You can already select multiple objects at once, either with Ctrl+Left Click or by making a group selection with your mouse (as shown below). The grouped selection is made by holding the click in a fixed position, then only dragging to select the desired assets.

Thanks to several comments from our testers, we have to admit that this is not the most intuitive behavior. Therefore, we are already thinking about improving this control in the near future. If you have any suggestions, we are open to them!

Thank you for your insightful comments.

[rader]

Guess I never stopped moving my mouse. Was always dragging the page around. Doh!

[AndersonSilva]

Hi Guys!

First of all, that´s an amazing feature I´ve hoped for a long time since I started using an on-prem Lansweeper. Glad to see it even only in Cloud plataform.

Right now, I have two considerations down below:

1. A Re Arrange buton will be consider in final release?
2. Asset distribution is pretty bad - I have almost 2,000 assets with several subnets and the diagram per scan server is completely messed up. Several assets are concentrated in the same space doing the visualization experience terrible.

[Julien_P]

Hi @AndersonSilva,

Thank you for your thoughtful comment!

Since opening the Preview to our users and using these features in real environments, we have observed some hazardous overlapping and asset distribution behavior. Our team is already focusing on improving the overall display behavior, by applying different strategies (rendering, positioning, etc.).

The ability to let the user rearrange automatically the displayed assets is an interesting option (instead of doing it manually). We would be interested to learn more about your idea. Would you like to share more here or by private message? Thanks in advance for your participation.

[random_name]

We're going to have one LS scanner at each of our many plants and we'd ideally be able to click on a link for that plant to see only that plant's diagram. I realize Locations can do this but the problem with Locations is that assets are not dynamically assigned to them based on any rules; from what I can see, we have to manually assign assets to a Location which simply isn't practical to maintain.

Dynamic groups would work perfectly for us since we have one dynamic group per plant, but dynamic groups do not appear to sync to cloud (I assume that's not a feature rather than a sync issue). Would it be possible to have a "By Dynamic Group" section for diagrams just as you do for "By Installation" and "By IP Location"?

[Julien_P]

Hi @random_name 

Being able to use the Asset groups (static or dynamic) that you have configured as a specific scope for your diagrams is an interesting idea indeed. Thank you for sharing it. I'll be sure to share it with our team.

[RobDz]

Will there be any consideration in having this function also be a part of the on prem version of LanSweeper in a future release? Unfortunately, we are unable to take advantage of the cloud platform at this time.

[Julien_P]

Hi @RobDz,

Diagrams is an exclusive feature of Lansweeper Cloud at the moment. We will communicate if these will be integrated into the local web console in the future.

[ayoung]

Currently we have 1866 assests but when I look at the preview map I get the message that I have over the 20000 limit.

Can you explain how this limit is reached?

Alan

[Julien_P]

Hi Alan (@ayoung),

The limit concerns the number of assets that the diagram attempts to display. As part of the Preview, a limit has been set at 20,000 to allow our development team to monitor the overall performance of these new features, which are now available to all our users. The goal in the future is to increase this limit or even remove it.

What is interesting in your case is that you are very far from the limit mentioned, which does not justify the display of such a restriction.

To help you, I would need to have more information on your environment. This will allow us to give you a concrete answer and to detect a possible grey area that we have not encountered so far. For the sake of confidentiality, and if you are interested in sharing more information with us, could you please contact me in a private message with your details?

Thank you in advance for your answer.