Ciscoworks in a multi-vendor network (juniper and cisco)

Feb 12, 2008 1 Replies

Hey everyone :) I'm interested in using Ciscoworks LMS in my network. I read up on some of ciscoworks whitepapers and i didn't see any reference to multi-vendor support. If the WAN is composed of juniper routers, then is it possible to monitor all of the cisco switches throughout the LANs in the network, without installing a server of some sort in each LAN to relay SNMP to the Ciscoworks server? Also, what kind of info can Ciscoworks monitor for juniper routers? Are there any drawbacks to using Ciscoworks as your EMS due to lack of important features (in general, not just for juniper of course)?



Thanks alot for your thoughts, Michael



Ciscoworks monitors everything via SNMP, so as long as you have the correct MIBs loaded on Ciscoworks you can monitor any device. Many of the MIBs are generic anyway so you will be able to monitor all the basics stuff right out of the box.. The only issue you will have is that automatic discovery many not work properly because CiscoWorks uses CDP to do this. You can manually do the discovery but this can be tedious, and they also have a "seedfile" that you can populate to the discovery process. This same problem exists in pure Cisco shops that have MPLS networks because CDP doesn't propagate over MPLS links.

From a usefulness point-of-view, I would not use CiscoWorks to monitor your network. The name that people who use it call it "CiscoDoesn'tWork" because it is very buggy, not very scalable and doesn't even manage Cisco devices very well. Since you are a multivendor network, you should be looking at third party products that are much more capable and probably a lot cheaper.

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