When the Atlas Cannot Be Loaded
If NetCrunch cannot open the atlas at startup it does not simply fail. It offers three recovery options in order of how much you stand to lose: open it again, restore it from a backup, or delete it and start over.
The atlas holds everything — nodes, monitoring configuration, views, credentials — so a server that cannot load it can do nothing at all. The startup screen reports "There were issues loading the Atlas" and offers a way forward rather than leaving you at an error.
These options appear in the Desktop Console. From the Web Console you can retry the load, but restoring and deleting are not offered there — recovery is deliberately a hands-on-the-server operation.
The Three Options, In Order
Work down the list. Each step costs more than the one before it.
1. Open Atlas
"You can try open the atlas again."
Worth doing first, because it is free. A load can fail for a reason that has already passed — a file still locked by a backup or an antivirus scan, a disk that was briefly unavailable, a service that was stopped mid-write. If the cause was transient, the atlas opens and nothing is lost.
If it fails a second time for the same reason, stop retrying and move on.
2. Restore Atlas
"Restore existing network atlas."
The card shows the date and time of the most recent backup, which is the number that matters: everything configured after that moment will have to be redone. Choosing Restore then lets you pick which backup to restore from, so you are not limited to the latest one — an older backup that predates a suspected bad change is sometimes the better choice.
This option appears only if a backup exists. If it is absent, there is nothing to restore from.
This is the moment the daily backup earns its keep. NetCrunch backs the atlas up automatically each day, so the usual worst case is losing a day of configuration changes — not the atlas. See Backup.
3. Delete Atlas
"When all options to resolve the atlas loading issue fail, delete the atlas. Then you can create a new one."
The last resort, and the product says so in its own wording. Deleting discards the atlas entirely and returns you to the create-atlas screen, from which you can build a new one by discovery or by hand.
Do not reach for this because the first retry failed. If any backup exists, restoring from it — even a fairly old one — leaves you better off than rediscovering the network and reconfiguring monitoring from nothing.
Before You Choose
The startup screen shows Last Operation Error with the failing operation named. Read it before deciding: it distinguishes a locked or missing file, which retrying may clear, from a corrupted one, which it will not.
If you have another NetCrunch installation, Import Atlas from another machine… on the same screen is a fourth route that avoids rebuilding from scratch.
- Architecture and Concepts
Overview of NetCrunch Server architecture. Learn more about Monitoring Engines, NetCrunch Consoles, databases, additional tools, and critical concepts of advanced network visualization.
- NetCrunch Security Features
How NetCrunch protects access to the console and the credentials it holds — multi-factor authentication, a master key for stored secrets, encrypted backups, and restricted access to the data folder.
- Network Atlas Views
Read about types of views and how they organize your data.
- Veeam Backup and Replication Sensor
This sensor allows monitoring of the state of all Veeam jobs and the capacity of backup repositories.
- NAKIVO Backup and Replication Sensor
The sensor integrates with NAKIVO Backup & Replication by polling its REST API. It collects repository state, backup storage usage, and job/task statistics to monitor system health and performance.
- Backup
NetCrunch automatically creates data backups each day. What a backup contains, whether it is encrypted, and what it can be restored onto all depend on the same thing: the credentials inside it.
- NetCrunch Databases
NetCrunch uses several specialized databases to efficiently manage configuration, event history, real-time status, long-term metrics, and documentation. Each database is optimized for its specific role in the monitoring platform, allowing NetCrunch to scale from hundreds to thousands of nodes while ensuring high performance.
- Update, Migrate and Backup
Learn how to perform NetCrunch updates, migrate it to other machines, or set up a backup.
- Atlas Configuration Upgrade
An atlas created in an older version keeps the predefined monitoring packs and views it was born with. The upgrade brings those up to the current release without touching anything you configured yourself.
- Glossary of Terms
- - Atlas View Settings