FindIT topology view / controlling topology layout

[RadekCZ]

Hello community, 

I´m facing 2 unlucky issues with topology layout in FindIT probe.

1) Probe discovers devices in my network, but puts them all in one line, very close to each other. Some devices are grouped very very far from the others ( example 10 WifiAP´s are placed 4 "full screens" far from the rest of the network ). It is about 35 devices overall. It becomes quite a long task to drag every single device closer to the network, so i can see them all on the same screen. I took the time to make the topology view nicely grouped on one screen, but then i clicked refresh button upper in the middle. After refresh, everything went back to default position and i had to do it again. Same unlucky thing happens by clicking rebuild topology button on the left. There is no way to rollback this. 

1a) can I somehow save the correct layout to prevent this issue?

1b) Is there any chance of dragging more devices together? 

2) There are non manageable devices ( other vendor switches/Virtual LAN ) that were discovered by probe. I dont want to see them. Is there a way to filter them out? I already found a topic here, that mention this issue, but unfortunately not solved. I believe, that tool like this should be able to filter out some device by hostnames. 

Maybe i just do something wrong or didnt find some functions, but i believe i have checked everything.

Thank you for reading

[David Harper]

The reason that there is a group of devices placed far over to one side is most likely because FindIT is allowing space to display the hosts in the network and it is likely that one of the devices has a lot of hosts associated with it.  Clicking refresh should not have changed the layout once you made changes other than adding any newly discovered devices.  If it did reset the layout back to the default then I'd like to find out what version you are running so we can investigate further.  Clicking Relayout Topology *will* revert the topology back to the original layout.  That is the purpose of that button.

To more directly answer your questions:

1a. The new layout is saved by FindIT unless you click Relayout Topology.  But there is no way to export the layout and save in a file, other than exporting the topology as an image.

1b. This is a good suggestion.  It is not possible right now, but I'll see if we can add support for it.

2. The previous topic you saw is correct in that we do plan to allow you to mark devices to be hidden and not managed, but we have not yet had the opportunity to implement the feature.  I do hope to get this implemented soon, but I can say it is not going to be part of our upcoming release.

Thanks,

Dave.

[RadekCZ]

Hello Dave, 

thank you for reply. 

I believe we have the latest version. It´s v1.1.4.20181022

Unfortunately Refresh button really destroys the layout the same way as Relayout topology button. I have checked again to make sure. Now i have to do the drag and drop job again :) See below the look of automatic topology layout 1st picture after long long zooming out. 2nd one to recognise at least device icons. If i wanted to drag all the hosts in nice layout, it would take at least 2 or 3 hours. ( until some refresh will occur again ) It´s quite sad surprise to see on Cisco original tool. 

I remember, that when i changed some network settings, Findit probably forced refresh and destroyed my nice layout. 

Comparing to other similar network managers, even the free ones, this is a big FindIT weakness in my opinion. "Save layout" should be basic function, especially if there are more people enabled to work with it in one company. 

There is another bad issue. When there is a new firmware for some device, i can click a button to upgrade it. Without any prompt or warning it starts the update and the process cannot be even stopped natively via findit. On our 10xWAP581 it caused a real mess during business hours, because they have lost some parts of configuration ( hostname, dns, ... ) due to buggy fw upgrade. Unfortunately the configuration couldn´t be even saved on the new fw, so we had to rollback to original old fw, reconfigure and we will upgrade them all manually later maybe. Another sad thing, as this never happened to me with much cheaper Ubiquity neither Asus devices. 

Generally I have many more problems with the FindIT. Especially when i compare to other vendors tools. I hope that next release will fix at least some of them.