It might be easier to say how we don't use NPM and NCM together, but I'll give a shot at what you requested--1000 points is a nice reward.
We use NPM and NCM to:
- Inventory everything, then leverage that information to ensure our Cisco SmartNet Support solution is up to date
- Monitor status of all devices, then alert us when thresholds are exceeded or nodes need attention or are down
- Alert our Help Desk when there are problems--it saves them and us time because they don't have to contact us to ask if something's down--NPM shows it immediately on their screens.
- Track daily Configuration Changes to ensure the right work is being performed, and that it meets our Change Management requirements and our configuration standards
- Back up and restore configurations when there are human or machine errors.
- Create new configurations for new equipment that matches our standards
- Provide trending analysis to many departments for bandwidth utilization, CPU status, Windows server status, and the whole Quality of Experience suite of views and reports
- Create monthly up time reports for management--and to ding our WAN providers with!
- Deploy scripts that are solid and dependable, to single devices or to many
- Search configurations without having to be on the actual production equipment--what a great way to prevent a fat finger from causing problems!
- Compare startup and running configs to ensure all is going to be the same after a power hit
- Discover and enforce and perform remediation on all of our equipment's configuration files. It's easy to make accurate bulk changes to names or to snmp-v3 settings or security settings--anything that needs to be done from a HIPAA or PCI point of view, we rely on Orion products to ensure it's done correctly--and to verify it complies with our standards and policies
- Customize reports to identify switch ports that have had no activity in six months or more, to enable them to be unpatched and reutilized.
- Deduplicate alerts through the use of Groups and Dependencies, which allow us to receive fewer e-mail alerts when a WAN connection to a site is down.
- Alert us when "Critical Interfaces" (e.g.: any port in a port-channel) are down, to ensure we are immediately aware of losing half of a resilient link solution.
E-mail me anytime you want to set up a conversation. I've been using NCM and NPM since 2004, and am always happy to share our success stories.