Experiences with LMS 2.5 - Good/Bad/Other?

[DAVID NOONAN]

We recently upgraded from LMS 2.1 to 2.5 and I've been severely disappointed. We've wanted to use CiscoWork to manage inventory, IOS and configuration for about 400 devices. Between the extremely annoying interface and the hit-and-miss operation of CWorks in general we haven't had much luck. We didn't have much with LMS 2.1 either.

I'm curious as to whether others are finding it useful or not. Does everyone else hate the interface as much as I do? Does anyone think that the CiscoWorks developers need to use their product to manage Cisco's network for a couple of months to encourage them to improve the product?

I'm really not interested in bashing CWorks, just in finding out whether I'm having a personal problem or it's as bad as I think it is.

[mark.egan]

Like you I have recently upgraded to LMS 2.5. I've only been using it for about two weeks and would agree that some more work could have been done on the interface but so far everything seems to be functioning well. My one big complaint would be that it took me a long time reading the manuals for previous version of LMS to get it to work properly and now it looks like I'll have to read them all again as a lot of the settings have changed.

[ToddWarren]

NOT Cisco Bashing -However......

The problem with the release of LMS 2.5 is that the name itself implies an upgrade. As you are well aware this is not an upgrade. This should have been LMS 3.0. Completely different interface. My issues are these(to name a few). (I rolled back to SOLID LMS 2.2.) The file system structure is the same, but the script files no longer provide the same functions as far as editting script varilables. RME caused TCP attack messages on all my SSH switch due to open TCP connections when fetching configs. This may have been because of HP nic-teaming (see the appropriate BugId). DFM was updated (?) beyond useablility. Received alerts when something went down, but not when the alert cleared. Alerts weren't always pointing to the device having the problem (see BugId CSCsb04678). Cisco still doesn't support their latest modules in this release (6748's, sup720's, FWSM, CSM(CSCeh24316). Couldn't customize email alerts to something other than default dns hostname (CSCsb05159). I liked the reporting features, however they changed how you access them (BURIED THEM). The notification flexibility looks like something that I could really use (Creating different groups, etc.), but there were issues that needed to be ironed out with that too. Nothing changed after the first patch. I waiting for LMS 2.5.10.

HTH

[dcwalker]

I have been using CWorks for about 5 years. LMS 2.2 was reasonably stable managing our 800 devices but prior to that it was always dying.

I have tried a few times to run up LMS 2.5 but I am having a lot of trouble even installing it. There are 5 apps and 4 service packs to install.

I am not sure if there is a special order to follow.

So far it doesn't look good.

[sfenderson]

I am not Cisco Bashing here, just telling it like it is. I have been running LMS 2.5 since last May. It seems LMS 2.5 has lots of problems. My upgrade from LMS 2.2 failed miserably so I had to perform a clean install. Then there was the bug about licensing DFM which required a patch. This was followed by many TAC cases to address all the problems I ran into. Some of the problems were fixed but many remain. I agree the user-interface is terrible. I can't believe some of the display issues like the different windows where you can't resize the columns to see all the text (DFM device detail) or you have to scroll all the way to the right to get to the vertical scroll bar (User Tracking). Overall I would say most of my problems have been with DFM. I still have issues with alerts that will not clear and alerts that sometimes take days to clear even though the alert condition no longer exists. I know new software will have defects and I expect this. However I am surprised how many this shipped with and how long it is taking to fix them.

[wsitu]

Totally agree with all your frustrations. This may be better for someone who has no prior experience with CW.