Lack of IPv6 Support

Let me break these into the two areas, IPv6 and Juniper.

IPv6:

We have been open in communicating our thoughts and plans on IPv6 for some time now.  See here in the Product Blog our post on our thoughts around IPv6 and our plans.  Yes, it has been around for some time, but until recently we have not seen significant adoption or demand.  As we are now hearing and seeing it more recently, specifically from the US Federal Gov't, MSP/ISP Market and Asia Pacific region, as you can see here, we are currently working on adding it to the next release of NPM.  We actually are wrapping up Beta 1 and getting ready for Beta 2 of NPM and you can see some comments from one of our customers on IPv6 in Beta 1 here.  We would love to have you participate in the beta as well and provide us your feedback, if you are interested, please let me know.

Juniper:

If you also look at the comments in the what we are working on post I referenced above, you will see a comment from Francois, another one of the PM's here at SolarWinds on Juniper.  Very recently we have seen a larger increase in demand for broader out of the box Juniper support and as such we are looking to add it.  We can't commit to it right now, but based on this we are trying to squeeze some stuff into the next release.  As we get further into the release and know if we can for certain or not, we will let folks know.  Love to hear your thoughts and ideas on what you would like to see.

Approach wise, yes, we do look at markets, but far and above that we look at what you, the customers are telling us.  We have customers across all market segments; Enterprise, Service Provider, Education, Federal etc.  We as Product Managers do our best to listen to what we are hearing from all of you and then prioritize it into releases along with fixing defects and some of our internal priorities.  We may not get it 100% right all the time, but I think we do a pretty good job overall at taking these inputs and moving the product forward.  

More than happy to discuss further with you if you are interested, just let me know. 

Thank you very much for the detailed response Brandon.

We rarely visit the Thwack site so primarily our feedback is from Technical Support when we engage tickets - I am learning that to get the "real lowdown" on what's going on and to voice our opinion as strongly as possible we should be visiting these forums much more often.

My point I guess is when it comes to IPv6 and/or Juniper that it's nice sometimes for a company to try their best (and I appreciate you can't keep everyone happy all the time including me) to keep "ahead of the curve".  That's my point on IPv6 in particular - it's been coming for a long time and you base your decisions on the most vocal folks in these forums (and I"m sure tickets too) .. now that some folks are finally going "gee, this IPv6 thing might actually be for real" is when you are starting to hear about it more.  We have actively deployed IPv6 since 2008 in our networks and were considered pretty late in implementation compared to folks in Europe/Asia - in reality, the folks in North America is much slower to adapt I'll admit.

Thank you for your time and response - appreciate it.

Paul Stewart

My thoughts, not that anyone asked:

1. IPv6 has "no demand" - this is what vendors have been saying for years and it's the reason we are currently in this mess now.  CPE vendors are about the worst at it, but on the backend, software vendors are the worst.  Nobody "wants it", so therefore, we're not going to bother adding it into the software.  I see a lot of things added into NPM and NCM that customers cannot possibly be clamoring for, but they are still added, perhaps because a single large enterprise customer of SW's wants it.  I won't accept the "nobody wants it, so we haven't added it" excuse from vendors anymore.  Be an industry leader, not a sheep that regurgitates the same drivel that every other vendor out there spouts out.  All that said, I really hope that IPv6 support is being added, as per the linked post, and am hopeful that you're finally joining the party.

2. The Juniper thing is a bit trickier, primarily because I don't believe that Juniper stores information in the HOST-RESOURCES MIB which I believe is where NPM gets its information.  The Juniper MIB is a special MIB, primarily because they needed a centralized place to store all the information about the various routing engines, FPCs, PEMs, FEBs, SCBs, etc., so there is really no *single* CPU information to gather.  I believe mostly what people want are the RE CPU stats, but what if you have two REs installed?  Which one does NPM get its information from?  If it's from the primary, what happens when there's an RE failure?  Will you have to manually re-discover the node?  Not only that, but because of the multitude of components that report CPU and memory in a Juniper device, there is no standard 'CPU Row for the RE', so it's different between model numbers and number of FPCs, PICs, etc. that are installed in the router.  I, too, was disappointed that we couldn't get this info from Juniper devices natively with NPM, but I do understand the issue and couldn't even begin to surmise how resolve it, besides just continuing to do custom pollers.

On the Juniper topic, have you seen this? It's not native router support, but it does the job for many users:

Also on Juniper, but SSG firewalls, are you guys running it? Any interest in sub-interface support, which is a topic we have activity on, and are considering native support for (not confirmed).

Can you elaborate on what Juniper devices you would like native support for?

- Routers ? What models?
- Switches ? What models?
- Firewalls ? What models?
- VPN Servers ? What models?

Thanks.

Thank you for asking.  We run the following today:

M7i, M10

MX80, MX240, MX480, MX960 w/ RE2000's and DPCE-R-20GE-2XGE, DPCE-R-2XGE-XFP, DPCE-R-40GE-SFP, DPCE-R-40GE-TX, DPCE-R-4XGE-XFP, DPCE-R-Q-20GE-2XGE, DPCE-R-Q-20GE-SFP, DPCE-R-Q-40GE-SFP, DPCE-R-Q-4XGE-XFP, DPCE-X-20GE-2XGE, DPCE-X-40GE-SFP, DPCE-X-40GE-TX, DPCE-X-4XGE-XFP, DPCE-X-Q-40GE-SFP, DPCE-X-Q-4XGE-XFP, MIC-3D-20GE-SFP, MIC-3D-2XGE-XFP, MIC-3D-4XGE-XFP, MPC-3D-16XGE-SFPP-R-B cards primarily (sorry for the long list).

EX2200, EX3200, EX4200 (including Virtual Chassis), EX4500, EX8208/8216 switches

Most of the SRX firewall models

SA700, SA2500 on VPN side and soon will be running MAG appliances

STRM and NSM appliances as well.

Hope this helps!

Paul

SW should bite the bullet and fully snmp walk a device and report back to user what OIDs return data.  Then let the user select which are polled, add transforms, etc..  Best I've seen so far is Zyrion Traverse(old Netvigil).

Solves developing specific support of a vendors devices.  Worst case you just need the MIB DB up to date.  Chances are it would force customers into buying bore licensing and pollers.

IPv6 has "no demand" - this is what vendors have been saying for years and it's the reason we are currently in this mess now.  CPE vendors are about the worst at it, but on the backend, software vendors are the worst.  Nobody "wants it", so therefore, we're not going to bother adding it into the software.  I see a lot of things added into NPM and NCM that customers cannot possibly be clamoring for, but they are still added, perhaps because a single large enterprise customer of SW's wants it.

Your point is very well taken.  And this response is not in argument to your point, but just some examples so you can see my side a little further as well.  Vendors come out with new initiatives and technologies all the time.  For example, Cisco has come out with EEM or Media Net, but we have not added support for that to the product.  Granted, that is not that same as IPv6, so let's take an RFC that has been around for awhile, but not taken hold, NETCONF.  I have been on calls from hardware vendors and a few customers and potential customers that have also asked about it and us supporting it, but we don't see enough market demand from users to consider prioritizing that above items folks are asking for.  On your point about us adding things people are not clamoring for, this does happen.  As I stated in my original answer, we as PM's have to find a balance between what ya'll are asking us for, defects to fix, but also internal priorities that have been defined.  It is a balance, but the beauty of thwack is ya'll are not shy about telling us when we get it wrong.  Please keep the feedback and posts coming.

I just posted a blog post on vNext and one of the feature in there, but also asking people to sign up for Beta 2, you can read it here.  Would love to have you both participate and give us feedback and anyone else interested.

Cool

We need support to MX EX SRX

/SJA

Your point is very well taken.  And this response is not in argument to your point, but just some examples so you can see my side a little further as well.  Vendors come out with new initiatives and technologies all the time.  For example, Cisco has come out with EEM or Media Net, but we have not added support for that to the product.  Granted, that is not that same as IPv6, so let's take an RFC that has been around for awhile, but not taken hold, NETCONF.  I have been on calls from hardware vendors and a few customers and potential customers that have also asked about it and us supporting it, but we don't see enough market demand from users to consider prioritizing that above items folks are asking for.  On your point about us adding things people are not clamoring for, this does happen.  As I stated in my original answer, we as PM's have to find a balance between what ya'll are asking us for, defects to fix, but also internal priorities that have been defined.  It is a balance, but the beauty of thwack is ya'll are not shy about telling us when we get it wrong.  Please keep the feedback and posts coming. I just posted a blog post on vNext and one of the feature in there, but also asking people to sign up for Beta 2, you can read it here.  Would love to have you both participate and give us feedback and anyone else interested.

That last part is very exciting.  I wish I had the time to devote like I used to, to doing beta testing.

While I understand your point, what most vendors haven't realized is that IPv6 is not just an "add-on" to IP.  It's the upgrade to the core protocol that runs the internet and certainly not in the same class as NETCONF.  However, I do understand what you are trying to convey.  SW has historically been pretty good about listening to customer demand, so certainly there are no complaints there.  I just think this should have been in the software much sooner than 2011/2012.

Speaking of netconf, any chance it's any further up on the priority list a year later?  Would really love to backup my ssl vpn's using NCM.