Portal Feedback - 8/22 - Managing Device Inventory

[Efrat Noy]

Hey team - first of all, awesome job on OnPlus. I had just a little suggestion after adding a few more beta sites:

Is there a way we could add a few ways to manage a topology better? One of my sites has a lot of client devices that are very transitory - iPads and iPods, etc - that I don't necessarily want to manage individually. In fact, It'd be nice if I could specify a 'bucket' to throw all these transitory devices (maybe defined by how long they are on/off the network - or by device type) that can be easily cleaned out as well (right click, delete all missing devices).

Having rules for deleting devices automatically that aren't seen on the network for a few days/weeks/months would also be helpful here.

It's just my topology is getting crowded fast, and I'd like to not have to search so hard for the 3-5 devices that make up the infrastructure of the network that I really want to connect to and work with. I've used filtering to get rid of missing devices, and that helps - is there something else I'm missing?

SAM

[David Harper]

One approach for this would be to define an address range - typically the DHCP range - for devices to automatically remove from the topology when they go missing.  Possibly having them persist for a certain amount of time might be beneficial so you can see where they have been, but I know I have a similar problem with transitory devices cluttering up my topology.

Cheers,

Dave.

[Michael Holloway]

Hi Sam and Dave,

Another possiblity here would be for us to add 2 new options to the Filter:

- Containing

- Not Containing

You could add a new device Category ( Gear > Device Categories ) and then set all the devices you don't care about into this new category.

Then, any time you don't wish to see these devices, you could select Filter, select Not Containing, and set the filter Category to that new one. These devices would then disappear from the views.

This could also help you track new devices that appear on the network that you haven't yet categorized as 'don't care about'.

-mike

[David Harper]

Hi Mike,

The only problem I see with that is that it is requires me to touch each device in some way, whereas I would prefer not to touch those transient devices at all.

My preference would be to be have the option of dhcp devices being treated as transient.  They are displayed while they are present and then disappear some period of time after they leave the network.

None of which should be taken to mean that categorisation and filters are not useful- they most certainly are - but rather that I see the two functions as orthogonal.  An alternative approach would be to have some auto-categorisation or smart categories (just like iTunes playlists ;) ).  If devices were able to be automatically assigned to a category on discovery based on rules, then that would also do the trick.  Imagine I have a dhcp category that conatins all devices with addresses in a particular range.  The the filters you suggest would do the trick nicely.  I could see this approach would be rather more difficult to implement though.

Cheers,

Dave.