Report of all physical servers

Jens Bech Madsen

• July 09, 2014 19:59

Does anyone know how to create a report of all physical servers? I keep getting the disk shelves for our SAN and various other rack mountable devices listed in the report. I cannot find a way to filter those devices out.

Am I doing it wrong by having the disk shelves as physical devices? I guess the alternative is "other" and then use a subtype for them. But then I cannot add them to a rack?

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  Raj Jalan

  • July 10, 2014 20:47

  Jens,

  If you use "tags" for these devices, then you filter those in the list view or in the reports using the assigned tags. Please let us know if that helps.

  Thanks.

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  Jens Bech Madsen

  • July 11, 2014 09:13

  Thank you Raj, I can see that would do the trick. I will have to go in and tag all my servers manually now, though.

  To me the entire device concept is very strange. I don't see why you have this fundamental difference between various device types. To me it would make sense that everything is a device with an associated subtype such as physical server, virtual server, network switch, KVM console etc. And then it should be user configurable so I can add device types that I need.

  That would make it very easy to filter reports on device types. And it would be very simple to get data entered correctly when adding new devices, rather than needing a procedure which says "you must add the tag 'server' to a device, when you add a server". I am worried that using the tagging method will give me inaccurate results because forgetting to add a tag is a simple mistake to make.

  Each device type could have some fundamental attributes such as "rack mountable or not", "physical or virtual" etc.

  But I will go ahead and start tagging my servers because I need to report on this.

   

  Thanks,

  Jens

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  Jens Bech Madsen

  • July 14, 2014 09:45

  Another drawback to this approach is that my disk devices take a device license when I add them as physical devices. I see them as components of the server or SAN controller they are attached to, not separate devices, so it does not seem right that they should be licensed. But I need to add them to make the rack diagrams correct.

  The Device42 web site states that I can add unlimited numbers of non-IP based devices. But I guess that is only true if those non-IP based devices are not rack-mountable.

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  Jens Bech Madsen

  • January 28, 2015 09:04

  Are there any plans to make this work in any sensible manner? Having to manually tag each device to be able to filter on device type is ridiculous and error prone.

  I've just updated a bunch of network switches where it turned out that someone forgot to check the box "Network switch". I cannot comprehend why this is a toggle on a device rather than on the device template. Surely all devices of a particular make and model are all the same device type?

  And for disk devices I still have my original problems:

  1) I cannot filter them without using tags since they are just "physical" devices

  2) Disk devices count towards the license limit even though they do not have an IP. This is in direct contradiction with how the license is supposed to work (unlimited assets without an IP address)

   

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  Raj Jalan

  • January 28, 2015 19:10

  Hi Jens,

  Both good points. We are working on making certain device properties "inherited" from the hardware model. If the hardware model is type "chassis" or "switch" - it should automatically be inherited by the device.

  Regarding storage shelf as "device" vs. "asset" - the reason behind that is disks can't be associated with an asset and have to be associated with a device. That said, we are working on adding more granularity/options around handling storage in Device42. Not sure if this will effect licensing or not, but the display of relationships will be much better.

  Thanks & Regards,

  Raj

   

   

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  Jens Bech Madsen

  • February 11, 2015 12:09

  Raj, can you please state explicitly whether you agree or do not agree that the current practice of counting disk shelves against the license count is in conflict with the wording on your price page (http://www.device42.com/pricing/);

  "All tiers enable unlimited numbers of available IPs, switch ports, non-IP based assets, hardware components, and all other types of data that can be stored in device42."

   

  In my opinion the software does not live up to the promise on the sales page. This is quite an important point for us as we are hitting the ceiling on our license and we don't want to buy the next tier, just because we have some disk shelves attached to our servers.

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  Raj Jalan

  • February 16, 2015 14:10

  Hi Jens,

  You are right about that, it is product limitation as of now. Once we finish the auto-discovery around storage, this will be addressed in the product.

  Meanwhile, I will send you a private email to get you going while we fix this.

  Thanks & Regards,

  Raj Jalan

   

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  Raj Jalan

  • June 18, 2015 23:41

  Hi Jens, 

  As per the point above - "We are working on making certain device properties "inherited" from the hardware model. If the hardware model is type "chassis" or "switch" - it should automatically be inherited by the device." , that has been addressed in v7.1.0.

  Thanks,

  Raj

   

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