MikroTik

The Dude is something i've been meaning to look at for a while. I have installed it and had a bit of a play, but I feel I should get some more focus rather than just randomly poking things and seeing what moves or bites back
Currently using NetXMS as a monitoring solution, but it's a bit more involved and fiddly than I care for and lacks some features I'd like. It - like most monitoring software - is geared more towards 'a' company monitoring its infrastructure. Rather than a IT solutions company monitoring a lot of other companies - meaning things aren't necessary setup the way we want, messy subnets, lot of overlapping subnets, often no direct access to their network and no VPN so things like subnet scanning from the core do not work (need remote agent scanning) etc etc, just a heck of a lot of devices with a heck of a lot of different setups. NetXMS agents can't do any scanning, only collect snmp stats on behalf of the core

One big benefit of The Dude is it can use mikrotiks to scan networks, and I can configure different scan intervals on those networks - absolutely ideal as we have a hugely varying amount of bandwidth among our clients so we can tailor updates for that

Some questions I have:
- Firstly, is there a good introductory series to getting familiar with The Dude? Wiki is too basic and doesn't guide me through what the dude can do and get a feel for it
- Can The Dude dynamically update links on maps? We have a lot of clients where we slowly migrate their network gear, replace all their crap, put MikroTik's in and set up management VPN's. I would love it if The Dude could automatically detect VPN's going up, draw lines showing them back to our HQ, to all their remote sites as they come online etc
- Can it deal with overlapping subnets? We have a lot of different clients that all use common private IP ranges, The Dude needs to be able to tell the difference between clients (Like specifying zones in NetXMS)
- Can it automatically make and update different maps for each client? I see that it can add devices, but it just puts an icon on the map, it doesn't draw any lines to it
- Can The Dude detect switches in the network? Show me which port a device is connected to and let me search for a device?. NetXMS is really good for this

Nobody?

It seems 'The Dude' is actually pretty popular and receives a lot of praise, but nobody knows how to use it? I can only find tidbits of information

Clearly i'm also not doing something right with it, i'm running an auto scan on our core network, with the recursive scan option with reliable scan method, it should find all the sessions and networks active on the routers but only finds about a dozen devices in total. We have thousands.....
SNMP is not working either, i've configured options for it but it only ever detects ping, ssh etc, snmp never shows up

Just as you rightly said, most people are able to use dude but we have few experts in it.
I suppose that if you have all your devices within networks that are reachable from your dude server, the dude should be able to discover all of them after the scan and not just a few as you stated.
Normally I check from the router running the dude server to be sure I can at least ping those devices in the network.

I have my primary test dude server running as a VM that is directly connected to the network i'm primarily polling, it picks up only a few devices, there are WAY more devices on the network (and yes they can be pinged from the CHR router)

This immediately is a huge red flag for me, since if I can't even rely on something as simple as device discovery by ping then i'm not sure what to do, there are far more than just MikroTik devices. Ping would be a nice start, but I also NEED snmp functionality, neither are working reliably whatsoever

I've also tried doing scans from 2 other dude servers which are CCR routers - same problem. I'm a bit lost as to what might be the problem at the moment, hence the need for some good tutorials and instructional videos to explain all the initial setup properly, and what does or doesn't work in common instances