FindIT Network Management Questions (Remove Devices, SNMP frequency & Port-Management)

[mneumann82]

Hello,

we are searching for an good software, to manage our Cisco SG-Series Switches and are actually in an evaluation with Cisco FindIT. The software looks promissing so far, but I can't get rid of three questions. :-)

1) How can I delete devices in the Probe, which are not offline? The "Delete-Button" is greyed out.

2) How can the SNMP frequency can be changed, so that FindIT is not connection to our Switches each few minutes. The high cpu load let the switches go into a warning state multiple times a hour, which is caused by the FindIT-Probe.

3) Will it be possible to get the full list in the port configuration in the future? I'm missing the visibility of the port description and the possibilty to change it. I know how to do it via WEB or SSH, but it would be great, if some simple Tasks could be done in FindIT directly. :-)

Cheers,
Martin

[David Harper]

Hi Martin,

Glad to hear you are interested in FindIT Network Manager. To answer your questions:

1. Basically you can't delete an online device. The reason for this is if you could delete a device that is still connected to the network, it would immediately reappear when FindIT discovers it again. The discovery process never actually stops, so the only way to permanently remove a device from FindIT is to remove it from the network.

2. The polling frequency cannot be changed today. However, I do hear you on the CPU load that this can cause, especially on switches with high port counts. We are looking at what we can do to better manage this without add the complexity of needing the user to manually tune polling frequencies for individual devices. I don't have a definite answer for you right now though.

3. We don't intend to replicate all of the device configuration in FindIT - after all, the device has a perfectly good UI for managing the less commonly used parameters. The goal for FindIT is to keep the UI simple and easy to use while giving you easy access to commonly used configuration. Now having said all that, I won't try to pretend that we had it perfect from the start, and we will continue to add configuration where it makes sense. That's where feedback like this is so useful, so please keep it coming. Talking about port description specifically, that does indeed seem reasonable to be able to edit that through FindIT, and I'll have a talk with the engineering team and see what we can do there.

This is really good feedback, and I do appreciate you taking the time to provide it.

Regards,
Dave Harper.

[mneumann82]

Hi Dave,

thanks for the quick and welcome reply!
I'm happy to get in touch with a person directly involved into FindIT. :-)

I didn't thought about the re-discovery of deleted devices. So that is a good point. I thought about this possibility more for testing purposes like auto-deployment of new firmwares and configs. So like: Deleting present devices and re-discover them again as "new", to see if the changes are applied successful.

As we got some SG250 and SG500-Switches with stacks, the port count is indeed quite high. Therefore it might be very helpful to tame the SNMP polling. As a idea, maybe it is possible to create SNMP-Profiles for Switches/Groups or to set the interval right in the SNMP credentials dialog.

Thanks for your effort so far, Dave!

Cheers,
Martin

[David Harper]

I take your point about doing quick tests. Unfortunately, you'll just have to unplug the device and be patient. Depending on the network topology and configuration it can take a few minutes for FindIT to be sure the device is offline.

We have a few different ideas for how to manage the SNMP load without requiring manual tuning or tweaking. Hopefully we will have something for you there in the early part of next year.

Keep the feedback coming - you can use the feedback icon at the top-right of the FindIT UI, post something here in the community, or email me directly at dharper(at)cisco.com. It all comes back to the same place in the end.

Cheers,
Dave.

[mneumann82]

Will there be any chance to see, which changes or new functions are planned or included for the next release? :-)

It's always good to see, that the development process is ongoing and that "managers"can see, that some missing features/changes are in pipeline. :-)

Good for a decision while evaluating. You know. ;-)

[David Harper]

Send me an email and let me know the sorts of things you are looking for. Happy to talk one on one about some of our plans.

Cheers,
Dave.