As a Data Network Managed Service Provider, we are constantly looking to demonstrate how we can add value to our customers. In the realm of Solarwinds NPM/NTA, the benefits of the single pain of glass view are apparent - once the customer is ON NET to us and the polling engine can 'see' the customers network infrastructure.
Here's my question / challenge.
For a customer who is not on-net to us (new prospect 'A' lets say), I would like to deploy a standalone appliance / application that can send discovery and utilisation data back to the 'mothership' NPM/NTA deployment at our HQ and give the customer a view of their network infrastructure via the NPM front end for a limited period of time. This ideally would "discover" our NPM/NTA deployment via the customers internet connection. Say after 4 weeks or so, we remove the polling device from prospect A, redeploy for prospect B and provide the same service etc etc...
I see this can give me two things:
1) Network sizing information for elements required by the customer for a potential MSP opportunity.
2) Utilisation data for bandwidth links and general network performance insight that the customer might be interested in and not know about.
Traditionally we'd use Observer Probes to do this kind of thing but I want to explore how to do this with NPM/NTA.
Does anybody know of a way to do this other than getting a cheap microserver, getting a trial of NPM additional polling engine and constantly asking for an extension or to renew - then setting up an IPSEC VPN back to our NPM server (could be hundreds of NAT translations!)? We have the SLX license for NPM/NTA so element count isn't an issue....
Alternatively is the NPM DPA Sensor for Networks an option (span port)? I guess this would give me application data but not network utilisation / traffic analysis
The more I think about it the more I think there must be a way to do this.... any thoughts / ideas?
Thanks
Darren