As a network engineer, I spend a lot of time hunting for information inside SolarWinds – especially in NCM configuration archives and IPAM. Out of the box, SolarWinds gives you a lot of power, but when you need fast, ad‑hoc searches across configs and IP address data, the UI can start to feel a bit slow and click‑heavy.To solve this, I wrote a small PowerShell script, search-solarwinds.ps1, that connects directly to the SolarWinds API and lets me search NCM configs and IPAM from the command line with a single command.
Why I Built This Script
The main pain points I wanted to fix:
- Too many clicks: Jumping between NCM, IPAM, and search panels just to answer a simple question like “Where is this IP used?” or “Which devices mention this hostname in their configs?”.
- Slow, repetitive workflows: I was repeating the same types of searches many times a day.
- Lack of quick context: I wanted fast answers in a single place, without having to export or manually filter results.
A simple PowerShell script that talks to the SolarWinds Information Service (SWIS) API turned out to be the most efficient way to streamline this.
What the Script Does
The search-solarwinds.ps1 script takes one main input – a search term – and does two things:
1.Searches NCM configuration archives
- Looks through running configurations downloaded in the last N days.
- Finds any configs that contain your search term (IP, hostname, string, etc.).
- Excludes devices with “Standby” in their name.
- Returns only the latest running config per device (no duplicates).
- Shows:
- Device name
- Config type
- Download time
- Then summarizes the exact lines where the search term appears.
2. Searches IPAM
- Checks for: IpAddress or name(string)
- Shows:
- IP address
- Status (USED, AVAILABLE, RESERVED, TRANSIENT, UNKNOWN)
- Reverse DNS (DnsBackward)
- Last sync time
- Comments
In practice, this means I can type a single command and immediately see where an IP or hostname shows up in both configs and IPAM.
How It Works Behind the Scenes
The script uses the SolarWinds Information Service v3 JSON API over HTTPS. It:
- Reads the SolarWinds hostname and credentials from a simple env file in your home folder:
- SOLARWINDS_HOST
- SOLARWINDS_USER
- SOLARWINDS_PASS
- Builds a basic authentication header and sends REST API queries with Invoke-RestMethod.
- Runs two SQL‑like queries:
- One against NCM.ConfigArchive and related tables.
- One against IPAM.IPNode.
The NCM part filters only ‘Running’ configs from the last N days and then groups by device to get the newest config for each device. On top of that, the script parses the configuration text itself to find the actual lines that contain your search term, which is incredibly useful when you’re troubleshooting. For IPAM, the query is simpler but effective: it matches the IP directly, or anything in the ‘DnsBackward’ (reverse DNS) that contains your search term.
Usage Examples
Once the script and environment variables are in place, the usage is straightforward.
Basic hostname search
.\search-solarwinds.ps1 webserver01
This will:
- Search all recent NCM running configs for “webserver01”.
- Search IPAM for:
- IP addresses equal to webserver01 (rare, but possible if you paste IPs),
- Any reverse DNS that contains webserver01.
Search by IP
.\search-solarwinds.ps1 172.16.1.100
This is great for those “Where is this IP used?” moments. The script will:
- Show which devices mention that IP in their configs.
- Show IPAM details for that address or anything matching its hostname.
Adjusting the time window
By default, the script searches configs from the last 7 days. You can change this by passing a second parameter:
.\search-solarwinds.ps1 webserver01 30
This searches 30 days of NCM config archives instead.
For now, though, this lightweight PowerShell script already saves me a lot of time and gives me a faster way to extract useful information from SolarWinds.
Code:
You can find the source code here:
https://github.com/czirakim/PowerShell.Solarwinds
