Navigation
How the console is laid out — the two navigation layouts, the five main sections, the Home screen, and the Atlas Tree panel with its search and ordering options.
The console is organized into a small number of top-level sections, with the Network Atlas Tree available alongside them. Almost everything about that arrangement is a preference you can change.
Two Layouts
The console offers a choice of navigation layout, in Preferences Navigation:
- Tabs at the Top
- Sections appear as tabs across the top of the window. The traditional layout.
- Icons on the Side
- Sections appear as icons down the side, giving the content area more vertical space.
Both reach the same places — this is presentation, not capability. The same preferences page also carries the Theme setting, which follows the system by default and can be forced to Light or Dark.
The Main Sections
- Home
- The starting overview. See below.
- Alerts
- Active alerts and alert history.
- Views
- The Atlas — everything organized into views: nodes, status, top charts, flows, maps, and the per-platform views such as ESXi, Hyper-V, BSD and Software.
- Apps
- The bundled tools.
- Settings
- Configuration and Monitoring Dependencies.
The Home Screen
Home answers "what is the state of things right now" without you having to go looking. It is built from tiles:
- Alert Status — active alerts, what closed, the last 24 hours as a chart, and the top alert categories
- Monitoring Issues — issue categories and how many nodes are affected
- NetCrunch System — server health, with used and free capacity
- Tasks, Alert Rules and Metrics — what the installation is configured to do
- Monitoring Probes — a shortcut to the probes view
- Recent Links — see below
- What's New — a short summary of what changed in this release, with a link through to the detail
The Credential Manager tile is Desktop Console only. Credentials cannot be managed from the Web Console, and the tile says so rather than failing quietly.
Recent Links
The console remembers where you have been and offers those places back on the Home screen. Anything you return to often can be pinned, which keeps it in the list rather than letting it age out; pinned entries can be unpinned again from the same menu. Until you have used the console the panel simply says so.
The Atlas Tree Panel
The Network Atlas Tree can be docked on the left, where it stays visible next to whatever you are looking at, or left undocked and opened when needed. The toggle is in Preferences Atlas Tree and on the tree's own menu.
Finding a View
The tree has its own search — type into it and it filters to matching views, showing which folder each one is in. Expand All and Collapse All are on the tree menu for when you would rather see the shape of the whole atlas than search it.
Tree Options
- Show Networks & Topology
- Include the IP Networks and topology sections. Turn it off if you work entirely in custom views.
- Show Empty Dynamic Node Groups
- Dynamic groups that currently match no nodes are hidden by default. Turn this on to see them anyway — useful while building the filter that feeds one.
- Enable Custom Tree Ordering
- Lets you drag views into an order of your choosing instead of the default one. Any item can be put back with Reset to Default Order, so the arrangement is never one-way.
- 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 Connections
Learn how clients and remote components connect to the NetCrunch Server — locally, through HTTPS, or via the NetCrunch Connection Cloud (NCC). Understand supported protocols, security levels, and available connection types.
- Network Atlas Views
Read about types of views and how they organize your data.
- SSH Terminal
An interactive shell on a monitored node, opened from the node menu in either console. The session is carried by the probe that monitors the node, so a device on an isolated network is reachable without a separate jump host.
- Alert Views
Active Alerts is one of the essential views showing current unresolved issues. NetCrunch tracks the state and correlates all internal events. When defining alerts for external events (SNMP, syslog, etc.), you can easily correlate by defining events that can close the alert.
- 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.
- 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.
- Glossary of Terms
Definitions of the terms used throughout this guide - alert, event, site, composite status, atlas node view and the rest.
- Administration Console
Window-by-window reference for the Desktop Console: how to navigate it, what each settings page does, and the tools it puts on the node menu.
- - Atlas View Settings
- - Node Group Views