FindIT Network Management Questions

[andyp]

Hello,

Recently I have been testing Cisco FindIT Network Manager and FindIT Network Probe.  Overall I think that the platform is really useful, however I do have a couple of questions/concerns that I would like to address before we make a financial commitment to this product, so if anyone can help to guide us in this decision I would greatly appreciate it.

1) Are there any plans to be able to add devices/subnets manually to the FindIT Probe.  Our issue is that we run separate vlan subnets for our workstations/servers/printers/management and need the ability to point 1 probe to different subnets instead of having to deploy a probe in each of these subnets.

2)  The backup configuration option for all devices is very nice, however, I understand from reading the Administration manual, that these backups are stored locally on the FindIT Probe.  I did find where I can individually download a config file from each device to my local PC, however, we would like the ability to download all config file backups at once to a network directory where we store all of our Configuration Backups.  In example, we run Configuration Backups on the first of the month for all of our SG300 network switches.  I would like to automate this process and then be able to direct the FindIT probe to a network share location to deposit these files instead of storing them locally on the FindIT Probe.

3) It appears that under port management, only our SG300-10 switches show up and not our SG300-28 switches.  Is there a reason that these are not available for Port setting modification through FindIT

Thank you in advance for all of your help

[David Harper · Accepted solution]

Hi there,

Thanks for the comments and feedback.  Let me try and answer each of your questions in turn.

1. A single probe should be discovering devices across multiple VLANs by means of querying the network infrastructure for what it can see.  However, there are a couple of caveats.  To be able to identify devices in other VLANs, the Probe needs to have SNMP credentials and a username/password to interrogate the switches that those devices are connected to.  Also, the switches need to be from the Cisco 200 to 500 series range (the 100 series switches are unmanaged and so cannot be queried.  But then, they don't support VLANs either, so that shouldn't be an issue).  Also, to do anything more than very basic discovery of the devices on other VLANs, you will need to be routing IP traffic between the VLANs so that the Probe can interrogate the devices directly.

My guess is that in your case, the switches are either one that FindIT doesn't support, or that we are missing credentials for those devices.  Doublecheck the Administration > Device Credentials page in the Probe to see if they are present.

Finally, we do have some roadmap plans to allow the Probe to connect directly to multiple VLANs, but I don't have a committed timeline for that at this stage.

2. I hear you on this, and you are not the first to make these requests.  All of this is roadmapped, and is reasonably high up on the priority list, but again, I can't give you a committed timeline.  They are *not* in the 1.1 version that is coming out in a few weeks, but it is possible we may be able to include them in the next release after that.

3.  There's no difference between the SG300-10 and SG300-28 switches in terms of FindIT being able to manage them.  If I had to guess, I'd suggest that the SG300-28 switches are probably running very old firmware that does not have all the API support we need, or that the Probe does not have valid credentials for those switches.  Make sure that the Administration > Device Credentials page shows that you have working credentials for those switches, and then check the firmware versions.  If there is a difference in version, see if you can schedule an upgrade of at least one switch to verify.  If the firmware versions are the same and the credentials are good, let us know and we can look into it.

Cheers,

Dave.

[andyp]

Dave,

Thank you very much for the information.  I see this as being a very useful tool for our business, especially the centralized management of VLAN's across multiple switches, and I am very glad to hear that Cisco is working hard to make this product meet everyones needs.  I am excited to see these features implemented in the near future.  Also, is there any documentation of implementations and changes that are bein included in 1.1 release you mention will be available in the coming weeks?

Thanks

Andy

[David Harper]

We will be posting the documentation in about a month, but some of the highlights of the 1.1 release are:

• Better visibility into the activity and performance of the wireless network
• Some discovery improvements for third party products
• Some additional deployment options beyond just virtual machines
• A lot of usability improvements across the application

Cheers,

Dave.