TL:DR – I’m trying to learn what other schools are using for third party management as I’m feeling heartburn from my vendor’s latest iteration of their own management toolset.
I have a question to the group about SDN/SDA/Assurance/CiscoDNA/etc and how they integrate with third party tools. My team just tried to deploy CiscoDNA on our campus, but after a disastrous launch we disabled it, then completely shut it off, and there it remains. When it was running, we tried out the CiscoDNA toolset and it was unable to do a software upgrade on a newer switch, it was unable to do an SDA-style config to a switch, and Assurance pushed code to all of our switches causing a repetitive outage until we removed the config for Assurance from the affected switches. I mainly wanted to run it for the Assurance data, but the rest of my team has (wisely) put this on pause. Cisco moved customers from WCS to Prime about five years ago, and then to APIC-EM, and now there is yet another transition to DNA Center. It seems to me that I require a third party toolset just to manage the pain of the vendor management platforms. I’m wondering what other schools are running for 3rd party analytics/management/aggregation/automation platforms? We currently run Nyansa Voyance which I learned about from this very group back in 2016. A school setup a semi-private Q-and-A of their own implementation of this software and it turned out to be exactly what we were looking for. It has since saved our bacon several times by either being able to tell us things our vendor-specific tools could not, or by validating the data we were getting either anecdotally or from our vendor tools (often poorly so). Are you running Solarwinds? LiveAction? NetBrain? Puppet with Git? Something else? Any tools or reporting from Internet2? (We are now getting the eduroam reports and love them!) I guess as an additional twist on my question, I’m also interested in what potential integration of third party solutions into the standard vendor solutions your school has been able to achieve? Cisco says that DNA (and thus Assurance) is an open architecture, but I’d really be interested in knowing to what degree that is true. I’d really like to see an open ecosystem and more potential integration between our Cisco hardware, management platforms, and third party apps. We are just beginning to program wayfinding into our school’s ERP app, and we are using their APIs to pull the data from within Prime and CMX, but we are interested in going further with this. I’m not just interested in Cisco shops—plenty of the schools on this list are running Aruba and talk it up quite a lot! One of the big schools that we regularly seek guidance from just switched to Aruba, so 3rd party integration with those toolsets now also interests our shop as well. Thanks for reading my long-winded post!--JW Jess Walczak Senior Network Analyst Information Technology Services [email protected] University of St. Thomas | stthomas.edu ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/discuss.
