This instruction is an update to that put out by SolarWinds. I spoke to their support and attempted to get and update added, but six months later I still don’t see it, so I’m putting up my own instructions for those that may be interested. The original instructions can be found here.

Add custom icons from graphics files

1. Prepare the icons and save them as .gif format. In my example I chose to use Arrakis as the overall map, with Arrakeen as the region of interest. Make sure you copy the icons to a smaller format and trim as much of the white space as possible. I’ll show you what happens when you don’t do that later.

2. Prepare the following files using whichever colors you’d like for the status icons. In my case, I’m lazy, so I only used four colors for all of the status’. You do need to have an icon for each status, however, they are not optional. Notice the large black area on each icon. This is wasted space you shouldn’t have in your icon set. All of the status icons Correctly cropped icon on the left, overly abundant white space on the right

3. On your SolarWinds server, paste the icons into the following folder:

%APPDATA%\SolarWinds\NetworkAtlas\Maps\Orion\<orion server address>\NetObjects\User Graphics.

%APPDATA% is typically located in C:\Users\<logged on user>\AppData\Roaming.

Example: “C:\Users\YOURNAME\AppData\Roaming\SolarWinds\NetworkAtlas\Maps\Orion\localhost\NetObjects\User Graphics”

Start Network Atlas on the SolarWinds NPM server. You can now assign the custom icons to objects on Network Atlas maps.

Assign a custom icon to an object

1. Create a new map and right-click to clear the default image and add your own.
2. Right-click and create a new object, then right-click the object on the map, and then click Select Graphic.

3. Select User Graphics in the left pane. Find your object in the list.

4. Select the graphic image, and click OK, then position and resize the new graphic so that it fits your background map and aligns properly. You’ll notice that my icons have a lot of white space. You’ll want yours to have as little as possible so that you can fit many regions tightly together so that there isn’t a mess of overlapping edges. I didn’t do that here because I’m only making one, so it doesn’t matter. Notes: If you modify the properties of the object, make sure that ‘Appearance’ stays on the style ‘Tri-Color’, or it won’t change colors properly. If I were to create another map that had more detail of the Arakeen region, with device locations out on Sihaya Ridge, you could drop that onto this map as the object. Then when you click on Arakeen, you will be taken to a detail map of Sihaya Ridge showing what devices are down, &c.