First Impressions - and What I'd like to see

[ttrentler]

First of all I think this will become a great product.  After using it for a couple of hours here is my two cents.

Topology view.

Right now it only discovered the subnet with the Access point and ESW switch on it.  It failed to identify my Uc520 and it shows up as an unknown Cisco device.

I'd like to see this discover not only my Uc520 but the phones attached to my voice vlan as well.  It should have also put the Uc520 as the root device and have an Uc500 icon.  Vista PCs are showing up as Windows media player sharing.

Main Web Page

In addition to showing a customer list, since this is a monitoring tool, there should be a list of critical alerts across all customer sites or an columns showing the number of alerts by severity.  I should be able to get to critical alerts without much drilling down.

Inventory

Consider adding the ability to use SNMP v3 to collect inventory and traps.  As a partner I've used the Cisco Discovery tool with SNMP to collect a lot of information about clients gear. And made many a sale that way. If you collect the serial numbers and software versions on Cisco devices you could generate reports for customers regarding patch status and alert partners on Smart Net status and upcoming renewals for service contracts.  This would help partners and Cisco sell more service agreements.  You could leverage the reports you already have in the Cisco Discovery tool.  Eventually you could also suggest (to the partner) CIsco gear to replace other vendor CPE since you have an inventory of all of their non Cisco gear

Reporting

In selling a network monitoring solution as a partner, we need to deliver reports to the end user.  A facility to generate and email nice looking automated reports regarding monthly uptime, patch status and response time are important. 

General

There needs to be the ability to print from the portal.

[Brian Bergin]

Aren't VLANs, generally speaking, going to be separate from your general use network?  That's the purpose of them, right?

I agree about critical alerts availablity without much drilling to view their resepctive details.

SNMP is absolutely needed; however, SmartNet isn't likely to be a huge concern for small business because Cisco hasn't learned they should sell SmartNet contracts for all Small Business devices.  I have recommended hundreds of RV082's since its inception and yet when their warranty expires that's it, they're considered disposable and yet many are active years after their warranty end date.  Customers would pay for the confidence that Cisco is behind them if they have a problem, but until you go to the Small Biz Pro lines you can't buy what is essentially an extended warranty from Cisco and even then they don't call it SmartNet.

I like the reporting option, but I'd like to be able to customize the reports with our company's branding.  Furthermore, what if we could upload those reports daily to a specified web server so the customer could access it, perhaps like http://customer.reports.vardomain.com ?  That could either be VAR hosted or Cisco hosted but with DNS entries to send customers to a VAR-branded site, with Powered by Cisco or something like that of course.  Currently, we use IPSentry in a couple of locations that does just that, uploads HTML code that's viewable by the customer at any time.

[Marcos Hernandez]

Multiple VLAN's is a high priority feature request in our list, one that we would like to implement during the Trial, rather than after.

Better navigation and usability is also high on the list, but this kind of improvement usually takes multiple iterations.

We will be working on SNMP support for a handful of OID's in the Cisco MIBs, for all the applicable products. We might extend this to 3rd party products, but we have to start with our devices first.

Reporting is also a high. I have expanded the reporting feature to include your suggestion: hosted reporting available to end customers. I have categorized this last one as "Medium" in the list.

Thanks,

Marcos