Does Orion have any plans to split out the IPT Monitoring and expand on top of it?
I am a long time Orion user and love it for monitoring network nodes and I love the IP SLA Manager, but I still view the IP SLA manager as a network tool.
I have recently moved over to managing the Cisco IPT site here and was wondering if you are thinking about taking the IPT monitoring capabilities out of IP SLA manager and expand upon it? There is not a lot of options to choose from for Cisco IPT monitoring and none of them have the straightforward simple interface that the Orion family has and quite frankly... I miss it.
If you could create a product that can do the following I think you would have a killer combination and an easy choice for both current Orion shops and new shop alike:
- Basic CUCM monitoring
Server health, cluster health and alerts, etc. I think you have a lot of this down already
- Gateway/Trunk monitoring.
Automatically add gateways and trunks that are SNMP pollable and monitor existing IOS stats that you do in NMP but with an emphasis on trunk/PRI stats, stats on FXO ports, trunkgroups. More of a telephony POV than a interface one found in NPM
- CDR records from CUCM
Collect real time CDR records from CUCM and analyze them for QoS issues (jitter, MOS, ploss, etc) and be able to alarm on them. Also keep a database of all calls for a user specified # of days and make it easily searchable
I think with those basic monitoring capabilities teamed up with the powerful reporting and alerting engines you currently have that you would have a perfect product that is nearly ready to go out of the box.
Some additional features that would be nice but may be a differentiators:
- Configuration management for CUCM
Monitor the changes made to the CUCM cluster and report on the changes on a daily/weekly basis (auditing etc). Be able to print out a complete "as-built" documentation for a cluster which has every setting on it.
- Compare phones/trunks/gateways/etc
Have the ability to compare two devices and highlight the differences - Monitor other IPT products
Unity Connect, CUPS, Meetingplace, IPIVR, etc (I actually have none of these but a single program could be awesome).
- UCCE Monitoring
UCCE is such a beast in itself that noone currently monitors it correctly. You could be the only provider there. This would probably be a product by itself (ICM, CVP)
Like i said before. If you make this product I will ditch the crap I just spent way to much on and be all over this. I also think it needs to be seperated from IP SLA. IP SLA is a network tool, I need a voice too to monitor my voice enviroments.
Please consider it. You are already 1/2 way there 
Thanks,
Brandon
