We use a lot of Network Sonar Discovery profiles (1 per remote site), the process of creating and maintaining is somewhat cumbersome. I feel that a few improvements should be done to improve it.
1st, Poll for VMware should not be enabled by default. I even wonder why there is a check box when the windows discovery does not have one... No credentials, no check?
2nd, when creatin a new discovery, our custom SNMP community names appear at the bottom of the list, before "public" and "private". If we forget to replace the order of those, we receive multiple intrusion alerts from our devices. We should be able to change our default order, or NPM should remember the last order used.
3rd, When creating or modifying a profile, we should be able to click which tab we want to modify or configure a parameter instead of clicking next to switch to the next tab.
4th, we should be able to provide multiple selection method instead of one. By example, you might have a LAN segment, and a few loopback address. That can be done through the subnet option, but then you have to recalculate everytime. (It cannot be done this way, there is a bug -Case #568531 - Start address must be less or equal to end address.) That should be more intuitive. Also, when entering the addresses range, the UI should warn the user when it will be horribly long to scan (ie: if you enter a subnet address in the start address, and the subnet mask in the End address by error). Once the scan starts, it does not stop as noted here: http://thwack.solarwinds.com/ideas/3108.
5th, The name and description should be asked in the first step, and reminded at everystep. This is usefull when building or modifying complex profiles. We put our Engineering number and site name in our profiles names. When you have to scroll into a few excel sheet to redline everything, this is usefull.q