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Extreme Disappointment in NCM 7.0 Integration Configuration

I have been a long time customer and champion of Orion products. We have NPM with 3 additional pollers...we have netflow module..we have APM...we have toolset....we have NCM.

I went to upgrade my standalone NCM system from 6.1 to 7 and at my company we choose to run them as completely seperate systems..no integration. So when running through the 7.0 wizard I chose no integration with other Orion systems....figured I was in clear like I usually am.....until I got to installing Orion core...didn't like my NCM database and wanted another??

Called support and they stated that this is expected...either I integrate with my NPM core or I do an entirely new database for just the Orion core for NCM. Really??????

I think integration is a good and wonderful thing when customers want it. When they don't it shouldn't make our lives more difficult. If a standalone option is given...it should mean it...I shouldn't need two databases to manage NCM in standalone. Whoever made this call made a critical mistake.

If the point was to force customers into integrating...job accomplished since I am not adding another db to the Orion family of products simply for Core services of NCM...but I am definitely not thrilled about this and wanted to voice my opinion on thwack.

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fcaron

Thanks Brian.

I'll contact you off-line so we can discuss this a bit more deeply.

brian_duvall

Thanks for the meeting. As we discussed I think the main problems with integration of platforms stems from the lack of granular Administrative control over the various platforms. If I have someone as an Admin of NPM, they inherently are admins of NCM. Sure I can remove the tab from their view but they can simply add it back at any time.

As we discussed improvements in this area would make me feel more comfortable with the tight integration of these platforms. Basically the ability to make users NPM Admin and/or NCM Admin and if they aren't an NCM Admin they have no way of adding NCM resources or accessing them.

Again..thanks for the follow up and look forward to seeing improvements to Admin delegation of rights in future releases.

Network_Guru

You have brought up an excellent point Brian.

According to Security standards regarding seperation of duties, there should be a true "User Admin" account, which can only add/remove/change users and their permissions in Orion. The account should have no mode managment rights.

There are very few vendors providing this type of RBAC, but I believe it is a requirement for certain industry certifications such as SOX or PCI, especially when dealing with configuration file on network devices.