DCNM and simple monitoring - What's your opinion?

[sdavids5670]

I'm new to DCNM but not new to monitoring in general.  I landed at an organization which recently implemented Nexus 7K / 5K / 1000v and UCS in their Data Center.  They had an older version of CiscoWorks and then they licensed the 7Ks for DCNM.  I'm just now exploring DCNM and so far I'm at a loss to describe how crappy it seems to be for basic monitoring.  I have to be missing something here.  I did download the "DCNM Fundamentals Guide for 6.x" PDF from Cisco's website.  After about 30 minutes of banging my head trying to figure out how to get statistical collection working, I did get some collectors going but it appears that if I want to collect basic statistics from my interfaces I'll have to go to each interface and setup a new chart and manually pick metrics and then manually start the collection.  On top of that, I'm limited in the number of metrics I can collect.  For example, on a physical interface I would like to get "Port Utilization", "In Octets", "Out Octets", "In Packets", "Out Packets", "In CRC", "Out CRC", "In Pause" and "Out Pause" ("Discards" and "Output Drops" are not even available options) at a minimum but I can't because that would exceed the maximum limit (why a limit???).  If I were using a product like Nimsoft or Solarwinds I'd be able to collect as many metrics as were available from SNMP and I wouldn't have to painstakingly visit each and every interface on each and every module on each and every 7K.  Instead, I'd be able to apply a uniform configuration on selected interfaces across all modules on a single device (at the very least).  Is DCNM a legitimate tool for historical monitoring of interface metrics or do most shops get a separate tool for monitoring?

[sdavids5670]

Did a bit more digging around in the Web Client and found that I could turn on performance collections for all licensed devices (which, for me, is our 4 7Ks).  I can select the following options when turning on the collections:

Trunks

Access

Errors & Discards

This appears to also automatically collect CPU and memory because now I can see statistics under the following areas:

Performance -> Switch -> CPU

Performance -> Switch -> Memory

Performance -> ISL/Trunks

I do not see anything under Performance -> Switch -> Bandwidth or Performance -> Ethernet and have no idea what those mean at this point.