Glad you asked. I've listed below how we view our priorities as it relates to integration. Please feel free to chime in if you'd like vote to prioritize differently.
1. Node management - ability for NCM nodes to be managed from Orion website "Manage Nodes" interface
2. Job management - ability to manage NCM jobs from within Orion website
3. Reporting - ability to leverage Report Writer on NCM database
4. Policy management - ability to manage NCM policy reports, policies, rules from within Orion website
5. User management / authentication - ability to directly leverage NPM users for authentication rather than linking to NCM users in Orion website
Right, the NCM integration module that's currently available is intended as a step in that general direction. The next step is to allow the NCM integration module to ship with the just the pieces of Orion "Core" it needs (e.g. website, syslog, traps, alerts, report writer, etc.) without requiring the customer to buy NPM. Then, you'd be able to install NCM on top of the "Core" of Orion for standalone or both NPM and NCM together for integration.
Chris - are these features anticipated to all be available in the next major release, or are we looking at these being available over a series of incremental feature releases?
It's a pretty extensive list, so honestly, I don't think they will all make it into the next major release. We have a number of items on the road map right now, so please do chime in with your preferences on prioritization or any other features you think should be on the list. Once we have 6.0 out the door we'll begin sketching out features for the next release, so now is definitely the time to let us know your two cents. Fwiw, in case you're wondering why we're always a bit vague about road map stuff - Denny wrote a nice blog post about it here.
5. User management / authentication - ability to directly leverage NPM users for authentication rather than linking to NCM users in Orion website
I'm probably getting a little off topic here with this, but if NPM user accounts were to be used instead of linking with NCM would it continue to be a static password encrypted in the DB locally?
Or is there gonna be any move in the direction towards integrating NPM with a password management system like radius or tacacs or something?
