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NCM Import - Almost as bad and infuriating as IPAM's

I have spoken in the past in length about IPAM's import because , well, it just ticks me off and makes me want to crane kick people.

Similarly, NCM's import is tedious and time consuming enough to the point where (like IPAM) it forces me to not use it taking away functionality of the product.

I would love to import often into NCM. I would even love to run scheduled imports.

But my network is large and the import process ends up turning into an hour of clicking. From my perspective, with just a few changes it does not have to be that way.

Like IPAM, NCM is a great product. But the import significantly detracts from it in my opinion.

I know you guys are working on the imports so I just wanted to make sure that this one could possibly get some attention.

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MarieB

Hi Donald--

Crane kicking, huh? Good think I've marked this for PM review.

Thanks for the feedback.

FormerMember

What import mechinism are you using

James

Donald_Francis

That's right Crane kicking, Karate Kid style!

To be more specific with my complaint. The process is well OK, until you get to the point where you have to select devices to import. With no sorting or searching capability I am left to having to click on about 2000 cisco devices among probably about something like 15,000 other devices.

I am working on one now and I honestly would trade my home gaming rig (HUGE sacrifice!) just to be able to sort by vendor.

FormerMember

hear your pain,

What type of import, file database ?

And what is your source is a XLS or CSV or a extrenal DB

Thanks

James

fcaron

Will contact you off-line, Donald.

mattjenkins

I have to agree with Donald,

I import form Orion everynight and overall that is ok for me... EXCPET the filtering is terrible...

I would love to be able to import and select mutiple criteria to filter on.... eg has to be Cisco and has to have a certain value in custom property A, and custom property B is true

FormerMember

I am assuming that just filtering by Vendor is not enough.

I agree with you , if you create a custom property for example in NPM and then want to import that into NCM, it would be great to be able to filter on that custom property you have created as well as the vendor.

James

mattjenkins

Unfortunatly not.....

We have our service providers routers in NPM and obviously dont want to import these... The other difficulty is that some machine types are also shared between us and our service provider (We have some routers and they have some switches) so filtering on machine type is also not good...

Custom Property sharing would be great and would also allow granular control of when devices get config backups, config script changes etc....

Eg a device with a 'Core' custom property would only need to get backed up once a week as it wouldn't change much, but 'Access' would get backed up every day.. or script a password change on 'Core' only etc etc

FormerMember

I have a solution for you

Create a custom property called Managed in NPM and assign your routers and switches a string called internal.

Then add the string external to the service provider routers and switches.

Add this custom property to the Nodes table in NCM.

I have created a SQL stored procedure that then updates NCM from NPM when a change is made to any of the custom properties in NPM that I use, so it is dynamic.

Now you can start to filter on all the types of scheduled jobs that you create in NCM and break out your devices by internal and external. So set all external devices to unmanged in NCM with another SQL trigger. If they are unmanaged then they will be excluded from any NCm type functions. yes you will have them in the NCM database but no actions will be performed against them.

Let me know if you want some help, I can send you the SQL stored procedure as well as the SQL to create the custom property in NCM

James