OK, I know this is probably like beating a dead horse from what I've seen but I've got to ask again. We have basically replaced CiscoWorks with the Network Performance Monitor and Cirrus. However, one thing we can't duplicate with the Solarwinds products is the User Tracking from Ciscoworks. We currently perform a nightly dump of the CiscoWorks User Tracking into a CSV file that is parsed and compared against dumps from other applications to determine what workstation was connected to what network port for auditing purposes. The switchport mapper in the Toolset will basically provide similar information but there is no way to automate it for all switches, let alone automatically dump this information to a CSV file. Since the folks at Solarwinds have been talking about this issue for a while but have yet to implement it I was wondering what everyone else is doing to resolve this in the meantime. I'm assuming there may be some ways to query the database directly but I'm certainly not an SQL expert and if someone already has something put something together it would be much appreciated. Again, this is not something that would have to be realtime but could be a nightly job. Please advise as it really is the only piece we have not been able to duplicate with the Solarwinds products.
No help from me sorry - but just for the record, we are in exactly the same position - we have retained Ciscoworks to dump out a daily user tracking csv for import into an internal auditing tool.
I had a long e-mail exchange with Solarwinds over this some time ago - basically this is not something that Cirrus can replicate at the current time, althought it was something that was being looked at for the roadmap. Hopefully a Cirrus rep might chip in with more info.
Sav.
Are you still on an older version of CiscoWorks? Obviously since we aren't planning to keep CiscoWorks we are on a fairly outdated version of CiscoWorks but it still gets the job done. My problem is now that I've been using Solarwinds I have been neglecting CiscoWorks so I don't know how much I trust it's data. It's a real shame that Cirrus doesn't provide something like this since I'm sure it has the data necessary. I'm hoping some others will have some ideas outside of CiscoWorks since it's such a hog and I hate to dedicate a server to CiscoWorks just for the User Tracking. Thank you for your response.
We have just upgraded from LMS2.6 to 3.0 (and 3.1 is released). User tracking on 2.6 worked just fine - but you wouldn't beleive the issues getting 3.0 to work (nothing has changed in the Ciscoworks product space it seems).
We don't really have a choice - both configuration management and secuirty require the user tracking data - until we can source it from Cirrus, Ciscoworks stays. Pretty much for everything else however we prefer to use Cirrus...(and the web interface in version 5 plus the Orion integration will take it to a new level I think).
The reason we changed away from CiscoWorks was because we were disappointed in the fact that they wanted to charge so much to go from LMS2.6 to 3. And the User Tracking in CiscoWorks is really good and certainly gets us exactly what we need. With the help of some custom Syslog parsing and Cirrus we have the config management covered. But like you said the user tracking is a must.
With all the improvements that Solarwinds has made with the Orion packages and Cirrus in general I'm extremely surprised they haven't gotten this taken care of. I have to imagine it's keeping some people from diving into their product line and is causing others to look at other packages to fill this need. The more they get into the web interface the better. I still have to remote desktop into the server way too often to call it a true web-based solution.
User Tracking is absolutely on our roadmap. Wrt/ web-based admin, please see this post: http://thwack.com/forums/t/9596.aspx
Chris LaPoint Sr. Product Manager NCM (Cirrus), ipMonitor, LANsurveyor SolarWinds Austin, TX
Chris,
Thank you for the update. I had seen the post regarding the beta and the web interface for Cirrus. It looks very promising. Unfortunately I don't have a test/dev environment for Cirrus or Orion and we depend on Cirrus too much at this time for me to sign up for the Beta but I'm hoping the final version comes out soon.
Please do keep us posted on the User Tracking. Until then I'm going to continue looking at what other options I have and limp along on CiscoWorks until the right option is found.
