Understanding the Location View

The Location View is one of the perspectives that Network Director enables you to view and analyze your network. Using this view, you can view devices and data based on their physical location and proximity in the network. By physical location, we mean the buildings, floors, aisles, racks, wiring closets, and outdoor areas where the devices reside. After these locations are defined and devices assigned, the Location View gives you a visual representation of your devices based on where they reside.

You can define the physical location where the devices in the network are deployed in a hierarchical way, and define location entities from a site down to the wiring closet. When in the Location View, the network tree shows the network in terms of buildings, floors, aisles, racks, wiring closets, and outdoor areas nested beneath the building. The hierarchy of the locations is:

• Site—Your campus; the highest node in your location.

• Building—One entry for every building at your site. Buildings are listed in alphabetical order, not by address or the order in which you identified them to the system.

• Floors—One entry for each floor within the building; Floors are nested within the building.

• Aisles—One entry for each aisle in a floor. Aisles are nested within the floor.

• Racks—One entry for each rack in an aisle. Racks are nested within the aisle.

• Outdoor Area—One entry for each named area; Outdoor areas are associated with buildings.

• Devices—Most are assigned to buildings, floors, outdoor areas, or racks. Devices are not assigned at the site level; those devices are considered unassigned.

The hierarchical model enables you to define a location by using either of these methods:

• Using the Location Setup wizard to set up a location in a single process, starting at the site level and progressing to the racks and outdoor areas. The wizard also provides an option to create part of the location, such as defining the site and building, then to use the individual procedures to create floors and wiring closets for the building you created.

• Using separate tasks to create location entities in sequence in a top-to-bottom order. You can create the higher level entities such as a site or building first and save them. Later, you can add floors and wiring closets when information about them becomes available.