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What we are working on for NPM

Now than NPM 10.2 is out the door, development has been busy working on the next release. Below are some of the features we are working:

 

  1. Background research and prototyping for new charts (there will be a blog post describing this in more detail soon).
  2. SNMPv3 support for AES-256.
  3. Improved handling of devices with multiple IPs
  4. Better support for international customers.
  5. Enhanced alerting around UnDP table pollers.
  6. Native support for Alaxala and Apresia (CPU, Memory, and Interface utilization).
  7. Support for changing polling method (for example: from WMI to SNMP).
  8. Continued improvements to ConnectNow (leverage CDP and LLDP information).
  9. Incorporating this community built resource by Gob which shows how long a node or interface was down.
  10. Support for a new SWIS Clear Event verb (helpful for integration with 3rd party ticketing systems).
PLEASE NOTE:  We are working on these items based on this priority order, but this is NOT a commitment that all of these enhancements will make the next release.  We are working on a number of other smaller features in parallel.   If you have comments or questions on any of these items (e.g. how would it work?) or would like to be included in a preview demo, please let us know!
  • 5) Oooooooooooooooooooooooooh yes yes yes. Table-based alerts do need improvement - it's very awkward at the moment. Alerting based on other values for that row in a different column would be awesome, but we would also need to be able to use other row values in the alert emails/actions.

    I'm not particularly bothered about the others, except for WMI<->SNMP switching which would be useful. There are a few things, however, that would significantly improve day-to-day duties with NPM:

    11) A more user-friendly method of bulk "schedule unmanage" - the current utility is very much a bolt-on & isn't integrated into the product.

    12) A method of auto-selecting a working mail server to send alerts through, rather than having a choice of only one. This is a very complex suggestion though.

    I use the Windows built-in evntwin.exe / evntcmd.exe for sending events to Orion as traps, with a small Powershell scripts for bulk SNMP config updates to servers:

    13) A more user-friendly conditions screen. It's very clunky right now, i.e. no "copy", import/export, the screen refreshes when adding a row, etc.

    14) The varbind numbers changed (minus 2) with a recent update - i.e. vbData6 became vbData4, vbData9 became vbData7. Needs consistency among versions.

    15) For trap alert emails, I should be able to use the varbind label, i.e. eventText or eventVar1 - these hopefully should never change and would significantly aid readbility of alerts.

    16) Built-in parsing of evntwin.exe-based SNMP traps would be truly awesome. Preparing these alerts & selecting criteria is massively time-consuming and quite prone to mistakes.

    17) Trap alert throttling in the form of only executing one action per host every X minutes rather (or in addition to) than the current options. Perhaps have an option to discard traps being sent to Orion at a high rate - for example, some Exchange events can number in the thousands, and the built-in Windows SNMP trap throttling system is awkward.

    18) A method of testing ("test firing") a rule to make sure it will work.

  • I am very excited about #1, I have made several suggestions and feature requests on that one; can't wait to see the blog post!

    I am also very excited about #3 as many of us have been asking for that for years.

    Overall I think this is a great list of things to look forward to, thanks for the update!

  • FormerMember
    0 FormerMember

    Hi

    Please add better discovery filters to the next release as this has been on the cards for years.

    1: Ability to filter by hostname or interface ifAlias

    2: Ability to filter by interface type or vendor

    3: Ability to add to a group based on a filter

    4: Ability to remove hostname suffix

    5: Ability to add custom properties based on filtering, meaning if your filter matches then add these custom properties to the node or interface

    Keep up the great work

    Kind Regards

    James

  • How about improvements around report writer and being able to graph reports and include a lot more flexibility.

  • Thanks for all of the great feedback everyone.

    jonchill, although we aren't going to work on Report Writer and graphs in reports, it's something currently under investigation to work on soon. 

    jawells, yes we definitely need to improve the discovery filter options. We took some of this feedback into account when we built UDT, but we aren't currently focusing on this problem today.

    Keep the feedback coming!

    Mav

  • YES!  #1, #3 and #5 are very much appreciated.  Have been looking forward to #1 for quite some time.  Please go big on this one!

    Would like to see more JUNIPER integration.  As in Juniper SA / MAGs don't poll CPU / Memory OoB.  Would also like to see a better UnDP interface. - ie, when trying to build and test a UnDP.

  • #3 is #1 in my book and has been since I first installed Orion 6 years ago.  The forums are filled with posts from myself and others of the complicated workarounds we implement to handle this problem on our own.

    The other one that I would hope could be done but is not on this list would be the ability to add some copy or import features to the traps and syslog modules.  I can copy an alert and alter for a new one but every one of my trap rules has to be written from scratch even though I may be only altering one simple aspect of it.  

    It seems a little odd that even though the interfaces are very similar between the alerting, SNMP, and syslog filters the features are not constant in the least.

  • Nice list.

    I would still like to see some work be done on the custom properties page.

    IE:
    Be able to set a list of drop down boxes for pre-entered values to prevent someone from using the wrong values.
    True/False being a checkbox
    Ability to define a "label" for the custom property that can be used to explain what its for.

  • Be able to set a list of drop down boxes for pre-entered values to prevent someone from using the wrong values.

    Agree completely

  • Thanks guys, those are all great requests as well.

    jspanitz, I'm going to contact you offline to get some more details on the Juniper SA / MAGs that aren't collecting CPU and Memory (I'd like to collect some walks from the devices).

    Mav