I was hired around a year ago to implement SolarWinds which was purchased to replace EMC Smarts for our organization. After adding all the nodes and working on months of discoveries and subsequent cleanup. I have been looking for a way to create a concise dashboard for our environment. While working within NPM I began playing with Network Atlas to come up with a simple view for our NOC. I created a simple view with our logo as the background and all the "Core switches" on it. Once all the nodes were selected and added to the map I clicked on the "ConnectNow" link and that's when the magic happened. I now have all my links mapped to all my switches that are able to show a real-time status on the node, interface, and link. Once I was done with that I began playing around with the "AutoArrange" option they are sorted in a spherical design that really ties the bow on the whole view. This product should come with a warning...I am now on my 6th map and created other maps for application specific views and one for our whole topology. Its one of the coolest programs I have dealt with in a long time and The best part is all you have to do now is link this to a browser and put it up on any screen you wish to show it on.
If you have not worked with the part of the SolarWinds product suite I strongly advise you to especially if you have been tasked for creating dashboards
-Dave