Hi folks,
as the title suggests I have some feature requests based around filtering inventory reports and also around exporting them. For the purpose of this request I will use the pre-defined 'cisco card data' report for my example but the feature requests will apply to any and all inventory reports.
One of the difficulties I have with running this report is that I have over 2500 devices many of which are 4500 & 6500's. This means the output of this report consists mainly of interfaces. Say for instance I wanted to filter the report to remove the interfaces so that only the serial numbers remain. In the NCM application GUI/binary this is not possible as the filters are only based around 'node details' and not inventory details. I'm not too bothered about this as this GUI is on the way out but I just wanted to highlight this as it represents the difficulty in managing the inventory data.
So moving swiftly on to the Web GUI,where there have been improvements and a search box has been included at the top of the displayed report which works pretty well for limited filtering. But there are numerous problems/limitations with the current setup.
1. You cannot specify a filter that says " show me only cells in a particular column/feild that are not blank". This would be great for removing unwanted excess info in reports
2. You cannot specify filters with multiple criteria. Infact it would be great if we had the option to 'specify a selection criteria' here.
3. I have only been able to export up to 20,000 rows from the web, after that I get the website error. It is not uncommon in environment like mine to have reports far exceeding 20,000 rows.
4. If for example I 'sort' a report in the Web GUI so that the first 10,000 rows contain all the values I am interested in. If I then export this report in it's current sorted state the exported excel or csv does not honour the currently selected 'sorted by' selection. Instead I get the original report that is presented upon intial opening.
Inventory data is a major requirement in any enterprise size oraganisation for tracking hardware and software. I find a lot of the time the information is in the NCM database but is very hard to manipulate and extract. I would like to see some improvements in this space in the coming releases
Regards
Ciaran
I also would like to see Network_Guru's suggested inventory features which are outlined here
