It would be great if it is possible to create a NCM job collecting ANY command output from NCM devices,
format it based on flexible filter/scripting criteria and write the results directly into the NCM/NPM database for further processing.
Further processing means e.g. create SQL reports, merge tables, show output on NPM/NCM GUI a.s.o.
Even Alerting based on NCM output would be thinkable and very fancy because SNMP is getting more and more unsupported as we see on new products like Cisco Nexus.....
I know this can be delicate to develop, wrong handling could crash SQL DB structure,
but I think this is a question of plausability checks on frontend like Solarwinds already does it very well in other features of Orion...
Examples:
Collect MAC address tables and ARP tables from Cisco devices, split collected fields and write it into SQL DB columns.
Then create a report, joining ARP with MAC tables.
Collect "show inventory", "show version", "show module" depending on Cisco device type,
to gather really the correct serial numbers of any component used in Cisco devices, module a.s.o.
Grep serials out of the whole output (e.g. via embedded scripting capabilities) and write it into database in format:
DEVICE | MODULE/PART | SERIAL
One major advantage would be:
we are not depending on any Vendor implementation for collecting valuable information e.g. via SNMP which can be very painful as we know.
So just pushing propper "show" commands will deliver what we need and we decide what we want to do with it.
At the moment it seems like this is only possible via NCM job and choose option "save output to a file"
This plain files have to be processed further outside of Orion via scripting which is not a good solution at the moment...
Thanks for your comments,
Maybe it's worth an idea posting?
Herwig
