Advice on CiscoWorks as network management tool

[silks101]

I have been given the task of looking at various options for network management tools.

We have cisco routers and cisco switches manily but there a still a small number of Nortel Switches on the network.

The question I have is this - how good is Cisco works compared to other tools? and does it allow us to still monitor the Nortel switches.

We basically need to be able to monitor the switches and routers and look a utilisation and other interesting reports about the network

thanks in advance

Steve Lindley
CCNA

 

[pflakes]

In the brief period of time I've worked with it, CW seems to always require patches.

Recently some of our staff went to Cisco and had a tour. They don't even use CW in-house. They've written their own applcation. I think it says a lot when a vendor doesn't even use their own product.

Check out Concord eHealth which seems much more stable and has a nice reporting interface if you're looking for utilization reports etc. and not Config backups or Config Management.

 

[vipergg]

Not overly impressed , it's slow . It's ok for doing mass config changes like passwords and config changes if you have a big network . Keeps archives of the configs to look at also . You get the graphical stuff with Ciscoview part of it . Don't think you will be able to do anything with the nortel stuff with it , you would have to have something like Optivity or something like that for those .