Smarts NCM: How to report on Cisco devices with EOL and EOS versions of the Cisco IOS using Smarts NCM Report Advisor and Network Advisor

Products

• VMware Smart Assurance

Environment

VMware Smart Assurance - NCM

Resolution

This article explains how to use Smarts NCM Report Advisor and Network Advisor to create an AD-Hoc report that specifically highlights Cisco devices in your environment that have Cisco IOS versions which are End-Of-Service (EOS) or End-Of-Life (EOL).

The following explains how Smarts NCM Report Advisor can be used to create an Ad-Hoc report to show Cisco devices which currently have IOS versions which are EOL or EOS.

 

Example Test Scenario:

• NCM 4.1.1 - Network Advisor 1.2.1 - Report Advisor 2.2.1
• Environment has a mix of Cisco IOS 12.x and 15.x devices.
• 12.x is EOL

The following procedure will use this example scenario to show how to create a custom report using Smarts NCM Report Advisor/Network Advisor to report on the Cisco IOS 12.x devices:

1. In Smarts NCM Report Advisor, click the icon highlighted below to create an Ad-Hoc Report:

 

2. Give the report a title and description, and select Device from the "Select an initial category..." drop down:

3. With the for Device drop down selected (still in Step 1 of 4), select Device ID, FQDN, Host Name, Model and Os Description as highlighted below. (all selections are required), and click Next to continue:

4. In the Set Column Sorting and Filtering dialog, use the Filter Expression field as highlighted below to define your compliance criteria. In this example, we want to highlight all IOS versions below 13. We know the enviroment has devices running IOS version 15 which is supported, but we also know that we have some devices on 12.x which is EOL. So in the example below, we are filtering all version less than or equal to 13 (<=13) to filter the report on all major and minor versions of IOS 12.

5. Click Finish to run the Ad Hoc report, or click Next to sort columns if you wish to organize the report layout further. The following shows two devices in the resulting example report that are running Cisco IOS <= version13:

6. With the Ad Hoc report created, you can now Change Report Settings, Schedule, Save, Export or Send the report.