We also run Nyansa and have been incredibly impressed with it. I consider it a ‘must have’ tool in our environment, and it has directly lead to many design changes.
With regards to other tools you mentioned, we are currently looking at NetBrain. Our POC is expected to end next week, and we have not decided yet if this will be the product for us or not. We run a very different environment of mainly NOT Cisco, like Extreme/Enterasys/Arista. While this too is advertised to work with those vendors, we’ve found a lot of little bugs with how the product parse these things. We have a lot of layer 2 in our environment, and the product’s forte is layer 3. With that said, the company has been actively engaged and has been fixing almost every little issue we’ve found. We would also like to use their automation platform inside the tool, but haven’t pushed that extensively during the test. The main objective was to get something with documentation capabilities that can get us off of a spreadsheet. I would say it is 85% there. The product, in my mind, is overpriced for the higher education market, especially once you get to scale. However, I think they are going to work on that, as well. So, before you go down the NetBrain road, talk to us in about a month. At that point, we will have either purchased it or moved on, and I’ll tell you why in detail. Ryan Turner Senior Manager, Networking ITS Communication Technologies The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill +1 919 445 0113 Office +1 919 274 7926 Mobile r...@unc.edu From: "WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU" <WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU> on behalf of Jess Walczak <jwwalc...@gmail.com> Reply-To: "WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU" <WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU> Date: Tuesday, July 24, 2018 at 12:48 PM To: "WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU" <WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU> Subject: [WIRELESS-LAN] Integrating 3rd party toolsets into your vendor-specific management platforms TL:DR – I’m trying to learn what other schools are using for third party management as I’m feeling heartburn from my vendor’s latest iteration of their own management toolset. I have a question to the group about SDN/SDA/Assurance/CiscoDNA/etc and how they integrate with third party tools. My team just tried to deploy CiscoDNA on our campus, but after a disastrous launch we disabled it, then completely shut it off, and there it remains. When it was running, we tried out the CiscoDNA toolset and it was unable to do a software upgrade on a newer switch, it was unable to do an SDA-style config to a switch, and Assurance pushed code to all of our switches causing a repetitive outage until we removed the config for Assurance from the affected switches. I mainly wanted to run it for the Assurance data, but the rest of my team has (wisely) put this on pause. Cisco moved customers from WCS to Prime about five years ago, and then to APIC-EM, and now there is yet another transition to DNA Center. It seems to me that I require a third party toolset just to manage the pain of the vendor management platforms. I’m wondering what other schools are running for 3rd party analytics/management/aggregation/automation platforms? We currently run Nyansa Voyance which I learned about from this very group back in 2016. A school setup a semi-private Q-and-A of their own implementation of this software and it turned out to be exactly what we were looking for. It has since saved our bacon several times by either being able to tell us things our vendor-specific tools could not, or by validating the data we were getting either anecdotally or from our vendor tools (often poorly so). Are you running Solarwinds? LiveAction? NetBrain? Puppet with Git? Something else? Any tools or reporting from Internet2? (We are now getting the eduroam reports and love them!) I guess as an additional twist on my question, I’m also interested in what potential integration of third party solutions into the standard vendor solutions your school has been able to achieve? Cisco says that DNA (and thus Assurance) is an open architecture, but I’d really be interested in knowing to what degree that is true. I’d really like to see an open ecosystem and more potential integration between our Cisco hardware, management platforms, and third party apps. We are just beginning to program wayfinding into our school’s ERP app, and we are using their APIs to pull the data from within Prime and CMX, but we are interested in going further with this. I’m not just interested in Cisco shops—plenty of the schools on this list are running Aruba and talk it up quite a lot! One of the big schools that we regularly seek guidance from just switched to Aruba, so 3rd party integration with those toolsets now also interests our shop as well. Thanks for reading my long-winded post!--JW Jess Walczak Senior Network Analyst Information Technology Services jwwalc...@stthomas.edu<mailto:jwwalc...@stthomas.edu> University of St. Thomas | stthomas.edu<http://stthomas.edu> ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/discuss. ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/discuss.
