Site (Device Group)

Description

Sites are one of the types of device groups available in Netreo. They are used to organize your managed devices into groups based on the concept of location.

A site may represent a physical geographic location (such as a street address), but it can just as easily be a theoretical system of organizing your network's equipment (such as a department or building floor).

Selecting the name of a site in Netreo opens its Site Dashboard, where you can view health and performance data for that site.

Details

Every managed device in Netreo always belongs to exactly one site, regardless of any other device groups to which it belongs.

Sites are initially added to Netreo during deployment (typically based on subnets) using the setup wizard, but additional sites may be added at any time to suit your organizational needs.

Subnets

Netreo will attempt to automatically place newly discovered devices into sites based on their subnet if that subnet is associated with a configured site. If Netreo cannot determine a site for a newly discovered device, it is placed into the "Unknown" site. You may then manually assign that device to whatever site is appropriate for your organizational system. Additionally, any device may be manually reassigned to a different site at any time.

Although individual devices may be assigned to a site manually, it is often far easier to add a subnet to a site's configuration and let Netreo assign any newly discovered devices in that subnet to the site automatically.

Geographic Coordinates

If a site is configured with latitude and longitude location coordinates, Netreo displays the site as a map pin in the Geographic Map dashboard widget. This feature may be turned off if you wish to use a different paradigm for your site organization.

If a site is not configured with a latitude and longitude, but is provided with a proper street address, Netreo will automatically attempt to retrieve a latitude and longitude for it using an external geocoding API. (Netreo must be able to communicate with the external geocoding application for this to work. See the Firewall Requirements for more information.) You must provide at least a city and state in the address information area for geocoding to work.

Sites using location coordinates may also be configured to display connections with other sites (which must also also have location coordinates). The Geographic Map widget will then draw lines between the pins of all connected sites, which may then be configured to display performance metrics.

Sites with location coordinates displayed in the Geographic Map widget and showing connections to each other.

Sites without location coordinates will not display on the Geographic Map widget. Although, they will still be fully functional in every other way within Netreo.

Documentation Information

A unique feature of site device groups is the ability to store arbitrary data in the form of site documentation information. This data consists of key/value pairs stored in the site configuration. There is no way to retrieve or view this data outside of the site's configuration settings, so it is only available to users with the SuperAdmin access level.

Device Templates

"Site" is one of the levels in the device template hierarchy at which device templates may be applied to managed devices. Each site may have one device template assigned to it on its configuration page. However, no site is required to have a device template assigned to it.

Site Status

The site status display provides an overall health status indicator for sites in Netreo. Site status is shown in the Tactical Overview dashboard widget, site dashboards, and Device Dashboards.

A site can be in one of five states indicated in the table below.

For the "On-Backup" status to be available, monitored interfaces must be tagged with the appropriate tags (site-primary, site-secondary, site-backup, site-backup-persistent). The diagram below outlines the interface checking logic used to determine site status. Refer to this diagram to tag your interfaces appropriately. See Interface Tag for more information about tagging interfaces on managed devices.

Site status logic.

The site status feature may be turned off by a SuperAdmin user by disabling "Display Site Status" on the Feature Toggle page (Administrator >> System >> Feature Toggle).