Intermapper Quick Start Guide
Intro
Here's how to get started with Intermapper.
This guide will help you get a quick start with Intermapper. Create maps, monitor your devices, set up alerts, and more!
What can you do with Intermapper?
- Check out the demo maps.
- Build a network map with autodiscovery.
- Manually add devices to your map.
- Personalize the map.
- Create sub-maps
- Use probes for more fine-grained testing.
- View status windows.
- Create strip charts.
- Create alerts and notifications.
- Acknowledge outages and problems.
- Start automating your network activities.
- Configure flows exporters.
- Enable remote access.
Got questions?
Start a live chat, email us, or call us at +1 877-276-6903.
Need a trial extension? Contact the sales team >
Helpful Links
What's New in this Version?
Get a quick summary of feature enhancements new to the current Intermapper version. See what's new >
Intermapper User Guide
This comprehensive online resource covers everything you need to know about using Intermapper. Explore the user guide >
Resources & Events
Register for Intermapper webinars and browse other educational content. See resources & events >
Intermapper Developer Guide
Learn how to customize how Intermapper monitors your network, including how to create your own probes. Explore the developer guide >
1. Check out the demo maps.
When the initial splash screen opens, click Try Our Demo Maps, and the main demo map will pop up. Although this map has fictitious data, it will give you a feel for the components of an InterMapper map, including:
- Icons: The Demo Main Map has several icons representing different office locations throughout a city. Clicking on each office location brings up that office’s submap. The color of the icon represents the most serious condition within that map: green is good, yellow is a warning, orange is an alarm, and blinking red means something is down.
- Links: The links (straight lines) connecting the offices represent a physical connection between them.
- Traffic ants: Dotted lines along the links indicate the level of traffic flowing on those links. A yellow or orange halo behind the link signifies when traffic exceeds 50% or 90%, respectively.
- Strip chart window: This window shows traffic flowing through all your links. To open it, go to Window > Charts > Internet Bandwidth.
Map List window: This window shows all the maps that are available on your Intermapper server. Double-click a map’s name to open the map in its own window.
Things to try (#1)
Things to try:
- Right-click the device icon for the Corporate Primary Router. Choose Status Window. This shows detailed information about the device, including its name, address, uptime, and more.
- Right-click on a link and open the status window to see detailed information about the traffic traveling on that link/interface.
- The Demo Main Map window defaults to Map View. Change to List View using View < List to sort by DNS name, IP address, etc.
- Double-click on the Network Operations icon. This opens a sub-map that represents the equipment at that location.
- You may hear InterMapper’s sound notifications when devices on the demo maps change state. To silence them, choose Edit > Preferences. In the Sounds menu, uncheck the Play Sound Notifications box.
2. Build a network map with autodiscovery.
Intermapper can automatically scan your network to learn what is there. You have the option to select your whole network—or to reduce scan time, you can also choose a specific IP address range or subnet.
After the initial autodiscovery, you can detect when new devices show up on your network by one of two ways: scheduled autodiscovery on set days/times, or using Intermapper Flows to capture devices that are not already in a map.
Things to try:
- Create a new map by choosing File > New Map. Give it a name (such as “Test Map 1”), and click Next. You’ll see the New Map window appear.
- Click the Autodiscovery button, and then click Create. You’ll see the Automatic Device Discovery window appear.
- Enter the address of the starting point. Intermapper defaults to using the local router, switch, or your own workstation. If you know the SNMP read-only community string for that device, enter it. All the other default values are fine. Click Start Discovery to begin.
- Let autodiscovery complete or stop it after a few dozen devices have been found. To stop autodiscovery, click Cancel in the top of the map’s window.
- Intermapper shows all the devices in a list with their IP address, DNS name (if available), probe type, and condition.
3. Manually add devices to your map.
Things to try:
- Create a new map and give it the name “Test Map 2.” Click the Manual Entry button, and then click Create, or add devices to an existing map by choosing Insert < Device.
- In either case, you’ll see the Add Device(s) window.
- Enter a few IP addresses or DNS names and click Add. Note that the devices appear on the map and will change color within moments, indicating that Intermapper is already testing them.
- You can also manually scan a subnet. Select one of the network ovals and choose Insert > Scan Network. Accept the defaults, and Intermapper will scan for devices that have addresses in that subnet range.
WATCH NOW
How to Create and Customize Intermapper Maps
In this six-minute video, learn how to create and customize Intermapper maps. You'll see how to change the layout of your map to reflect your network topology, customize your map icons and background image, and display animation to make your map come to life.
4. Personalize the map.
Things to try:
- Drag items around to match the way you think of your network. Lines between devices “rubber band” to preserve the interconnections. Remember that the network ovals represent subnets (address ranges) and act as the connecting points between devices.
- Change the label that appears in the rectangle for a device to include more descriptive information. Choose Format > Label (Ctl/Cmd-L) to see and edit the current template for that device’s label.
- Change a device’s icon from a rectangle to a different icon or shape. Select one or many icons and choose Format > Icon to pick a new icon.
- Add a background image to position devices as you like. Simply drag a PNG, JPEG, or GIF image into the map window to add it, or choose Edit > Map Settings.
5. Create sub-maps.
Things to try:
- Open a map’s window (use the “Test Map 1” map you created above) and position it next to the Map List window so you can see both.
- Drag a map name from the Map List into the Test Map 1 map window. You’ll see an icon appear on the Test Map 1—this is the sub-map’s icon.
- Drill down into the sub-map by double-clicking its icon. You’ll see the sub-map’s window open.
WATCH NOW
Layer 2 Mapping with Intermapper
In this seven-minute video, learn how to convert Layer 3 to Layer 2 diagrams. Create the map, run your scan, and choose exactly what you want to see.
Have you attended an Intermapper Feature Tour yet?
Our technical solutions consultant Kevin Jackson hosts a 60-minute feature overview every week. It is a great way to learn what the product can do and ask any questions you have.
While ping tests are useful, Intermapper’s real power comes from its probes—software plug-ins that collect information from a device to show more about its performance. Select a device and choose Monitor > Set Info > Set Probe. You will see a window with categories of probes on the left.
Things to try (#6)
Things to try:
- Automatic: This probe uses either Pings or SNMP queries to monitor the device. If the device speaks SNMP, Intermapper will use the SNMP traffic probe to query the device. If not, Intermapper will ping the device and report if it ever goes down.
- SNMP traffic: This probe monitors traffic on routers, switches, etc. It works with nearly every vendor’s network equipment.
- Network devices: These probes monitor a variety of other equipment, such as Cisco, Apple, APC, other UPS vendors, and more.
- Servers-Standard: Probes for standards-based servers, such as mail (SMTP, POP, IMAP), web (HTTP & HTTPS), LDAP, Radius, DNS, etc.
- Servers-Proprietary: Vendor-specific probes for Barracuda, Citrix, Big Brother, Microsoft, Nagios, and many others.
7. View Status Windows.
Things to try:
- Right-click a device and choose Status Window. A device status window shows the DNS name, IP address, uptime, and response time, along with other data collected by its probe.
- Right-click an interface and choose Status Window. An Interface Status window shows the device name, type, and address.
- To open a status window temporarily, click and hold on a device—the status window will pop up and go away when you release the mouse.
8. Create strip charts.
To create a strip chart:
- Open a status window as described above.
- Click any underlined value, and select Create Chart. You’ll see a new chart window open.
- Drag other underlined values to the new window to add them to the chart.
9. Create alerts and notifications.
A notifier is the way Intermapper alerts someone about an event. Every time Intermapper detects a change in a device or interface state (from OK, Critical, Warning, Alarm, Down, or some other state), it can trigger a notification/alert. Intermapper has notifiers for sounds, sending email, sending pager and SMS messages, and running scripts.
Things to try:
- Create a notifier from Edit > Server Settings. Scroll to the Notifier List, and click the + at the lower left corner.
- Choose from various notification types: email, text/SMS messages, pager, sounds, sending a trap or syslog, sound, running a command-line script, etc.
- Adjust the Notifier Schedule to change when alerts will be sent.
- Attach the notifier to a device by right-clicking on a device, selecting Device Notifiers, and checking the boxes for state transitions that should trigger alerts.
- Attach the notifier to an interface by clicking on an interface, selecting Interfaces > Notifiers Window, and checking the boxes for state transitions that should trigger alerts.
WATCH NOW
How to Create and Assign Intermapper Alerts
In this step-by-step video, learn how to create a notifier, then assign it to the devices or interfaces you want to monitor.
10. Acknowledge outages and problems.
When Intermapper detects a problem, it changes the color of the icon of the affected device to yellow, orange, or red, depending on the severity. This makes it easy to see where the trouble is. If you can’t correct the problem right away, it becomes difficult to notice when new problems occur.
Intermapper allows you to acknowledge a device. When you acknowledge a device’s condition, it is still down, but the icon will turn blue to show that someone has taken responsibility for it.
Things to try:
- Select the device to acknowledge
- You can also select multiple devices, or all devices on a map (Ctl/Cmd-A) and acknowledge them together. This is convenient when a lot of events occur at one time.
- Choose Monitor < Acknowledge (Ctl/Cmd-‘) and enter an acknowledgement message in the window that appears. This does three things:
- The icon turns blue to indicate that it has been acknowledged.
- It stops subsequent repeated notifications.
- The acknowledgement message, along with the login name and IP address of the person who acknowledges the device, are written to the Event Log file creating a record of what happened.
11. Start automating your network activities
Before you start, you must:
- Install Intermapper and Automate on the same machine.
- Run the products on the Windows platform.
- Run Automate version 10 and Intermapper version 5.9 or later.
Once Intermapper and Automate are both installed on the same machine:
Integration steps:
Once Intermapper and Automate are both installed on the same machine:
- Open Intermapper, and go to Edit > Server Settings.
- Under Automate, check the Enabled box.
- Create Intermapper notifiers and Automate tasks,
Next steps:
- Create InterMapper notifiers that can trigger Automate tasks. Learn how.
- Create Automate tasks. Watch the video.
12. Configure flows exporters.
Your trial comes with the ability to configure up to five devices as flows exporters that will send performance metrics to Intermapper. Once you configure at least one network device as a flows exporter, Intermapper will collect and display the data so you can use its visual dashboards to troubleshoot network performance over time.
Selecting a device as a flows exporter depends on the type of traffic you want to examine. To see how internal users are connecting outside the network, choosing an exporter on an edge router or switch, or firewall, is usually best. To look at internal traffic, choose a device on the network backbone.
Getting started with Flows:
- Determine that your device supports flows technology (e.g. NetFlow, JFlow, sFlow).
- Configure flows on devices to export to the IMFlows collector.
- Ensure that the IMFlows service is started and running.
WATCH NOW
Getting Started with Intermapper Flows
It's easy to get started with Intermapper Flows. Watch this four-minute video on how to install and set up Intermapper Flows for your environment.
You can also check out our step-by-step guide that covers:
- Questions to consider before you get started
- Installing Intermapper Flows
- Editing the settings
13. Enable remote access.
Your trial includes five pooled remote access licenses. (Learn about the different license types we offer.) Pooled licenses give a group of users shared access to a specific server. For example, an MSP could leverage multi-tenancy to allow both internal network teams and client-side IT staff to access the Intermapper server from wherever they are. The MSP could then set map-level permissions to guarantee each client can only see their maps and not those of other clients.
A major benefit of pooled remote access is the flexibility they give users to access the server from any device they are on. For example, a user could access the server from their office computer in the morning, a laptop during the afternoon, and a home computer at night.
What you can do:
- Control IM server console using the remote access client.
- Configure user access to maps and data.
- Access web reports.
- Access the web interface.
Whether your trial's about to expire and you're interested in pricing information, or you're using our free version and are curious about upgrading, request a quote and let us know what you need. We'll be in touch to discuss your requirements and help you get to the next step with Intermapper