Cisco Prime LMS is the company's LAN Management Solution software, re-branded from the CiscoWorks label. I am sure there are many reason for the re-branding for marketing reasons, but one of them, I believe, is that CiscoWorks has never worked very well.
Cisco has a decent reputation with its networking gears, with the company's long history in the industry. What surprises me is that, Cisco's software (which is running all those iron boxes) are of such low quality that it is almost shocking.
Case in point: Cisco Prime LMS, which is at version 4.2 as of this writing. LMS also has had a long history. I am not into all the details but from what I have learned from working with it: there are a few main modules that Cisco has acquired from other companies -- the Campus Manager (CM), the Resource Management Essentials (RME), Device Fault Manager (DFM), Internetwork Performance Monitor (IPM), CiscoView, and more recently the Health and Utilization Monitor (HUM) is added into the mix. Before version 4, those modules are clearly displayed in CiscoWorks portal as distinctively independent pieces with visible overlaps and confusing user interface layouts. For example, many of those modules do Reports. I as the user of LMS need to know exactly where to go to create what report.
Although things have not changed much under the hood, so to speak, LMS 4.x versions have done a better job in presenting a more unified user interface over those modules that still function pretty much the same way they used to. The main menu is now organized into functional activities: Monitor, Inventory, Configuration, Reports, Admin and Work Centers -- These are now the main UI menu components.
Judging from what I have heard from others, it is not my ignorance of the product alone that makes it so difficult to use. The software is at version 4.2 at this point, to expect it to not break down randomly should not be an unreachable goal. But that just seems to keep happening.
A minor case of quality problem: I want to run a script to export the user tracking data. Since that data is then fed to other scripts that I don't control, I need to use a custom layout for the export so that I don't break other people's scripts.
I created the layout in the Report Designer. When I tried to use the layout, I got an error message saying that ERROR UTCLI: Error loading preferences. custom-ut-export-layout is not a valid layout name for this user.
Since there seems to be no way to allow a custom layout designed by one user to be used by another -- at least I have not been able to find that if it does exist, I deleted the layout. Logged out of my session. Logged back in under the user account in my script. Re-designed the layout with the same name. Re-ran my script. I got the same error.
I logged back in as the script user, went to the Custom Layouts page. My layout was nowhere to be found.
I logged out. Logged back in as myself. No custom layout of that name, or in fact, no layout besides the three standard ones in the list.
Out of ideas, I restarted the LMS. Logged back in, still nothing.
Logged back in as the script user, created the custom layout with a different name. I made a copy of it just in case. I logged out then back in again. Nothing. Both copies of my layouts are gone.
To make sure that I didn't confuse LMS, I restarted it, then repeated my steps. Still the same result: No custom layout.
At this point, I seem to have lost the capability to create custom layout with no clue about what I did wrong to get into such a bind. Maybe because I reused the layout name between two users? If that was a bad thing to do, I certainly did not receive a warning from the software.
I should probably start to look for an open source alternative to LMS.
Don't confuse LMS software quality with IOS software quality. In my experience the development and support of these software products takes place on different planets.
ReplyDeleteIOS is updated continuously, and bug fixes are regularly incorporated into the product. Overall it is a pretty solid platform.
Conversely, LMS (or Ciscoworks or Cisco Prime or Cisco NCS, whatever the name dujour is) comes out of the box horribly broken in several places. Bug fixes are slow to be released, if they are released at all. It seems that often the only way to get a bug fix, or to even learn one exists is to open a case with TAC. Sure, they might incorporate the fix into a future release, but don't expect to see a point release with the sole purpose of patching the myriad tangle of flaws.
Ever try to delete a device from the DFM (fault management) module in LMS 4? They seem to have forgotten that functionality. It was there in LMS 2. It was even there as far back as Ciscoworks 2000. So here we are now at version 4.2.1 and there still is no way to do this. So if a device gets added with an IP address rather than a name as a device identifier it seems the only way to fix it is to reinitialize the three DFM databases and rediscover everything. Brilliant.
Here is something else that is laughable. Release 4.2 introduced the compliance reporting function. Seems they had intended that to be an add-on, i.e. they want more money to activate the feature. But they seem to have forgotten to include the licensing part upon release. So what do they do? Release a point patch to activate licensing! There was one other point patch available on CCO for 4.2, though I don't remember what it addressed exactly. Yet the release notes for version 4.2.1 list 45 resolved bugs. Why aren't these made available?
LMS is a good tool if you can ever get it working correctly. But you may have to hire an additional employee to spend time on the phone with TAC in order to make this happen. And when you finally do they will announce end of life and you will get to do it all over again after you pay for the new release.
+networker: You are right. But IOS is not without its own problems. Recently our team has been experiencing an issue where some ports on new 4500 switches seem to not come up when a PC on the port comes back from power-off. And I have seen a lot of "supported" SNMP MIBs with holes in them.
DeleteWe don't use DFM, per our Cisco engineers' recommendations. :-)
I've had fun with the Compliance Reporting feature -- I admit that didn't do much homework on that. So we went to TAC asking why the feature is not available to us. They led me through the whole license upgrade process and a few weeks later came back and told me that I actually had to pay money to get the feature.
I am hanging in there but I may just give up on LMS when I find enough time to work out an alternative.