With the release of cnMaestro 3.2 the era of getting on-premise cnMaestro X for free is over, we have around 2000 devices in multiple tiers for our business, PMP450, ePMP, cnWave, Enterprise WiFi , cnMatrix, cnWave 60GHz, PTP670, and PTP820s, how do you justify paying for this per device? Why does it need to include Cambium Care Pro? I just want to be able to manage my devices.
Is anyone else in this situation?
When you say just want to manage your devices, is the free cnMaestro Essentials not sufficient for you?
I do agree that the bundling of CC Pro can be frustrating if it is indeed inflating the price of the management license, which is what most people actually want from X in my experience.
Forgot to mention the monitoring too, but unfortunately, we would need X for cnMatrix switch management, MSP features, and long term data retention. There’s probably a few more features we use without realizing it’s an X feature…
This is a misunderstanding - cnMaestro X is not required for cnMatrix management.
(cnMaestro X is still required for MSP features and long term data retention)
Thanks for the clarification Simon, none of the resources I’ve found have been really that clear on what exactly is the difference between Essentials and X, and what I actually would need to purchase licenses for.
Like for MSP accounts, would I need to buy a license for only the devices that would be in the MSP account? And what about reporting, would I only be able to run reports on devices that are licensed? And if how does the system know which devices are and aren’t counted in my licensing, am I expected to license them all regardless if I only wanted to license what’s in my MSPs?
cnMaestro X is enabled at the account level, not the device level. You need a license for each (non-Free Tier) device in the account, at which point the account will upgrade to cnMaestro X. There is no way to enable cnMaestro X features for a subset of devices.
Since MSP accounts are a cnMaestro X feature, you also need cnMaestro X licenses for all the devices in your MSP accounts.
cnPilot R-series devices are part of the Free Tier and do not require a license.
So say I have 100 PMP450 SM’s would I just need to buy 1x MSX-SUB-T1-1 to unlock the x features of those 100 devices or would have have to buy 100x MSX-SUB-T1-1?
If you want to manage all 100 devices on the same instance, it’s 100 licenses. If you buy just one license, then you only have one slot to fill.
You would have to have the other 99 on a separate Essentials account, which isn’t practical in this scenario.
A belated follow-up: as of a few weeks ago, Tier 1 devices (PMP and ePMP subscriber modules) are now part of the free tier. The MSX-SUB-T1-1/3/5 subscriptions are no longer required.
Does that mean the Tier 1 devices will have more than 7 days data retained?
Not exactly.
cnMaestro X is an account-level feature, not a device-level feature. If you have upgraded your account to cnMaestro X (by purchasing subscriptions for all the non-free-tier devices), then all devices will gain the longer-term data retention. If you have not upgraded, all devices are still limited to 7 days.
The cnMaestro website has a data sheet download that will help clarify what constitues cnMaestro X features. You can find that here: Connected Device and Network Management with cnMaestro X
TBH, with the exception of mass firmware updates, all many WISPs want to do is monitor CPE signal levels and modulation over a couple of years so we can determine if a radio’s performance has degraded. Many don’t need all the other support, managed WiFi, CBRS SAS (not useful outside USA) and other features that CNMaestro X offers and if we did, it wouldn’t be across our whole deployment so the account-level pricing makes zero sense.
Please just remove the 7 day data retention “hobble” from CNMaestro on premises as it’s ridiculous that open source NMS gives us more useful graphing and alerts on Cambium equipment than Cambium’s own software.
cnMaestro is not free for Cambium to develop, but we give away a significant portion of the functionality for free in cnMaestro Essentials. cnMaestro X allows us to continue to develop the product by charging the people who get the most value from it. If you don’t get any value from it, you shouldn’t pay for it. If there is an open source NMS that is more useful to you, you should obviously use that instead.
It’s possible that we will introduce different pricing options in the future with different sets of features, and perhaps those will be a better match for your needs.
All I’m saying is that a couple of other popular radio manufacturers provide free NMS software that meets typical WISPs requirements and that’s a large reason why many persevere with their equipment even if their radios aren’t as good. The 7 day data retention on CNMaestro on premises is the single biggest issue with CNMaestro as we have to graph signals etc via SNMP on a separate NMS. Monthly fees for advanced features (some of which look really good) are fine but not for basic functionality. Price it in the cost of the hardware if you must.
Provide decent free management software for your hardware - sell more hardware. Simples.
Ah, you want Cambium to charge more for our radios 
?
In all seriousness, your feedback is very much appreciated. Setting the price for something like cnMaestro is not easy. It is used by customers in very different markets, such as WISPs, managed service providers and enterprise networks, each of whom have different needs and usage patterns. The change to stop charging for subscriber modules was made specifically to help WISPs.
Ah SEE, SEE he said it. The costs are already rolled in. LOL
I jest of course.
My main complaint was less about the Pricing and more about the cloud requirement. Defeats the purpose of On-Prem
When upgrading to a modern version of cnm, do you still get a trial period for X features? IIRC it was 30 days or so before?
I know that this is an old topic, and that Cambium’s so far down the road on what (at least I think is) a bad turn at this point that anything I say here is unlikely to change anything, but I still think this is a discussion that needs revisiting.
So, here’s the thing: a few years back, when it was still in its infancy (maybe 2.0 had just been released?, but I think it was actually even earlier than that), my employer had a Cambium rep come out to visit us, who then sat across our conference room table from us and told us that, in stark differentiation from many of your competitors, you all are developing Maestro and not charging licensing fees for it BECAUSE you wanted it to be a carrot that enticed further hardware sales. That you guys were in the business of selling and supporting hardware, not selling licenses for a management platform for said hardware. That Maestro was a perk that made the hardware portfolio as a whole a more attractive offering. Thus it was very much implied that Maestro’s development and key to success (and vice-versa one of the keys to the success of the hardware…a virtuous cycle of sorts, if you will) was that it was just considered part of the internal cost of developing and maintaining the products themselves. This was also why you had an On-Premise option: because you weren’t trying to lock people into being dependent on a cloud service if they didn’t want to be. All you cared about – at least the narrative went – was making your products the best to use and manage, with the lowest barrier to entry.
We bought this hook, line, and sinker. So to say that this sudden pivot a couple years ago feels bait-and-switch-y is putting it mildly. We have reduced our Cambium spend over the last couple of years, and while the reasons for this are multi-faceted, I would say that this has definitely played a role.
Let me first clarify that we have rolled out our own On-Prem instances, and that most of my gripes here have to do with the fact that there is now essentially zero differentiation between the Cloud version and the On-Prem version. After all, if cnMaestro X was a set of paid features that applied only to people who wanted to use your cloud-hosted product, that would be one thing. It makes SENSE to charge extra for certain things in that context, especially if the things you are charging for are directly related to paying for and keeping the cloud service up-and-running. If memory serves me correctly (& it’s entirely possible I’m all wet on this next point), that was actually the original intention behind designating certain features as Pro or X: they’d be paid features on cnMaestro Cloud, but were no extra charge with On-Prem.
But can you explain how, for example, it makes ANY sense WHATsoever to limit historical data retention on an “Essentials” On-Prem instance to only THREE MONTHS (and that if I’m understanding correctly, until fairly recently it used to be just SEVEN DAYS)?? Sure, on a cloud instance, where YOU are paying for the storage and the CPU cycles, that makes sense. If you want more space to store more logs on someone else’s server, then pay up. But WE are the ones who are paying for the server that WE deployed On-Prem to…everything from the electricity to the CPUs to the disks that the logs get written to. It doesn’t cost YOU one extra dime to let us keep more logs on our own box. We are even taking on all of the responsibility for making and maintaining backups of that data, NOT you. In fact, we are reducing your administrative overhead by deploying On-Prem, and yet you still are going to charge us just as if we are using a cloud-hosted service? For LOG FILES?
And don’t get me started about this whole Anchor Account nonsense. Admittedly, for CERTAIN things, it makes sense. If you deploy CBRS gear, you need to be talking to SAS in the cloud in real-time, so, sure. Enforce it there. But if I deploy an On-Prem instance whose Account View I set to “Enterprise” mode, because I’m essentially trying to set up the Cambium equivalent of a UniFi Controller that’s dedicated to only managing cnPilot APs, you’re telling me that now my On-Prem instance must be connected to the internet so that it can talk to your cloud servers every time I want to on-board a new device to it? The hell? What ARE you guys smoking?
All you guys are doing is drastically INCREASING the friction it takes for us to use Cambium product, instead of making it EASIER for us to say “yes!” This only discourages us from buying and deploying more. UniFi Controller has always been more “popular” with most of our staff, so when some of us first tried to majorly push cnPilot Enterprise gear for new deployments within our org, we got some pushback. All you are doing with all of the extra activation requirements and nickel-and-diming of features (especially ones that we used to have) is driving us further away. UniFi gear was already way cheaper, and I don’t have to go through all of this crap when setting up a UniFi Controller, so now you are just making my job HARDER, and not merely more expensive.
I’ll leave you for now with this thought: right now, we have an On-Prem instance that is on version 3.0. It still works perfectly fine, and is doing all of the things we ask and need of it. Some of the so-called “X” features that we use on it include 1-year historical data retention, the external user authentication server feature (AD/LDAP/RADIUS/TACACS+) to link our staff log-ins on Maestro to their employee AD accounts, and the MSP feature so that we can give end-users that we have deployed your product to direct access to their own network (which is something we can easily give end-users on a UniFi Controller, no BS required). If we upgrade to a newer version of On-Prem, we lose all of these features unless we pay per-device for licenses. The ONLY thing we cannot do by staying with the older version? Use newer products of yours. We cannot for example deploy any of your WiFi 7 enterprise Pilots and manage them with Maestro On-Prem 3.0.
And because of this? We simply won’t buy any. Instead, we’ll buy somebody else’s WiFi 7 product to deploy. We can leave our current On-Prem up for managing existing deployments, but you have actively disincentivized us from buying any of your new hardware product lines. Congratulations.
Perhaps that highlights just how penny-wise and pound-foolish this new direction of yours is.
For what it’s worth - in December I met with Cambium about a nearby Housing Authority connecting all their buildings and client residences. 769 Suites across 13 buildings, and we presented the compelling features & options of Cambium APs, features which were very well received - but the board instantly voted down the proposal as soon as paying for management for the radios they were buying.
And I must say, while I’ve mostly LOVED being a Cambium fan for the vast majority of reasons, the flip-flops on policies from when ePMP came out… I feel what you’re saying. Things which Cambium told us about how ePMP was different from the old Canopy way of doing things, yet here we are today, and sadly finding ourselves buying less and less Cambium for some of these same reason.