EMC SMARTS Network Configuration Manager - Outputing scheduled jobs to a repository opposed to email ?

Hi Ross:

It sounds like an interesting question and I'd like to give you accurate feedback. To that end, would it be possible to clarify how the information will be used and what format is most appropriate for that use? I can certainly understand the challenges behind parsing the content of notification e-mails for jobs that were executed against large numbers of devices. At present, the only notification option available in NCM wherein NCM initiates contact upon completion of a job is the e-mail notification. These notifications encapsulate the data in the body of the e-mail text rather than as an attachment in some other format. Other notification options pertaining to actual job runs in NCM are generally not considered suitable for delivery of this kind of information (ex.: SNMP traps sent from an NCM host).

The NCM Report Advisor component may be the easiest solution to the question you have raised. It is an NCM component, has the ability to schedule reports at regular intervals, and is capable of outputting the resulting data in spreadsheet format. The data it provides is more detailed than the notification e-mails to which you refer in some respects, but is less detailed in others (ex.: device interaction error messages, discovery job narratives, or other free form data about the job run is not generally included in reports, but device data, actual configuration change text applied to device configurations, etc. can be obtained that are not available in notification e-mails). The caveat to using the NCM Report Advisor is that upon job completion, the background processes responsible for transforming the data into a suitable form for reporting in a normally operating NCM instance can take up to 30 minutes in processing before making the data from a completed job available in any reports.

External reporting options also exist. For example, EMC has an excellent enterprise class, consolidated reporting tool known as EMC Monitoring & Reporting (formerly Watch4Net) that has the capability to consolidate reporting on a wide variety of host, storage, network, software, and other infrastructure deployments. There is an NCM Solution Pack available for that tool that allows it to provide detailed reports on your NCM deployment similar to the NCM Report Advisor.

Alternatively, NCM provides an API that can be used to query the instance for jobs information as well as to initiate jobs when called from external connections. It is up to the external code calling the API to determine a schedule for polling such data. Solutions that call the API are considered custom, external solutions and generally require you to familiarize yourself with the NCM API. This kind of external automation is not generally of a nature that EMC can directly support, since in most cases EMC has no direct knowledge of the solution unless it was provided under a support agreement tied to an engagement with our Professional Services Team. However, we do have many customers that have taken advantage of the NCM API to achieve greater flexibility and force multiplier effects in their NCM deployments.

Lastly, it is also possible to query the NCM PostgreSQL Control Database (controldb) component directly for a subset of jobs related information. However, similar to calling the API from external code, this approach provides no options within NCM for initiating the data dump as a notification, but would merely react to queries as they come in.

Feel free to post again for any clarifications or to pose additional questions relevant to this topic.

Regards,

Paul D. White

EMC Technical Support Engineer, NCM / EMC M & R

Hi Paul,

          Just got your response(Just returned from leave) Many thanks, Report advisor may be a better option, I will spend some time looking at what I can generate, I am not really looking to do anything ground breaking really, I am looking to send some basic Cisco "Show"commands to a large number of devices and then collect certain aspects of the output that are off interest, I wasn't sure if report advisor would have the capability to be able to report on the generated output of the "show" commands but if it can do this and output the data to an excel spreadsheet that would be great

Thanks Ross