General Questions about cnMaestro

brubble1 · February 14, 2019, 3:24pm

We used cnMaestro on-site briefly a year or two ago and found it less than useful given its limitations and lack of some seemingly basic required features (such as actually being able to alert you to alerts...).

We are at point in our business where we need to decide how we are going move forward with auth, accounting and whatnot. So some questions.

(1) cnMaestro seems to be a pretty low effort / priority project at Cambium with things being promised "next quarter" and then taking years to actually happen. Is there any kind of roadmap for this product and even if there is, what does everyone feel the likelihood is that the roadmap would be meaningful ? How good has Cambium been at producing vs promising on this project ?

(2) Has Cambium said when they expect cnMaestro to be a released product instead of a beta or alpha or whatever it is now ? Assuming they have given a target date what is the likelihood they will be even close ?

(3) I see they finally got email alerts working... not very reassuring that it took years to add such a basic function.

(4) Another big downside for us was that the on site version could only keep 1 week of historical data (usage) this made it useless to us.

(5) Even if just a week of data had been useful there appeared to be no way to sort , or otherwise use the data. For example if I wanted to see the top 10 or 20 or 100 downloaders, there was no way to do that. Or maybe I wanted to see the radios sorted by how many times they dropped connection or lowest RSSI to highest.. nothing was possible. So any plans to increase the period of time data is collected for, maybe even add archiving of said data ?

(5.a) Manipulating the data collected an option on the road map ?

(6) Backing up / storing configs of the radios and devices monitored ?

(7) Monitoring non-Cambium devices ? Possibly allowing user created pluggins for other devices / data collection / etc.. ?

(8) Cambium said somewhere along the line that they plan to charge for the on-site version when it is released. Has there been any kind of info on exactly how they plan do this ( Monthly fees based on number of customers or flat up front price and extra for support ? )

Rob · February 14, 2019, 6:38pm

Hi brubble1 --

1. Based upon our track record for prediction, I understand your feelings. Our top priorities today are releasing 2.1.0, which has a number of highly-requested features and new support for PTP, cnReach, and cnMatrix in Cloud, and 2.2.0, which adds high availability to On-Premises. The uptake and number of feature requests have exceeded our expectations, and there is a lot of pressure to expand functionality and device support simultaneously. We are looking for ways to improve development efficiency, and expand the feature set to be more useful to Fixed Wireless and Wireless LAN customers.

2. cnMaestro has been in production for a few years, and the base feature set is free. At times we have had closed or controlled betas, and we will continue those from time-to-time. In the 2.1.1 Cloud version, which is imminent, we are experimenting with an open beta for cnMatrix.

3. Email alerts have been the feature that always fell just below the priority line for the next release. We finally have them available in 2.1.0.

4. The week-long historical data will be increased later this year as part of cnMaestro Pro.

5. Improvements to the data collection and visualization will continue through 2019. The Data Reports (which allow download of statistics and performance metrics) and the RESTful API are meant to allow integration into third-party tools, such as Excel or Power BI. These are available now. We expect to increase the number of statistics, and are open to suggestions. The feature list for 2019 has significant improvements for data acquisition, visualization, and streaming, but we will hold off on discussing them until their release dates near.

6. Configuration backup in On-Premises is done through the System Backup and Restore (which essentially persists everything). We do have plans to enhance this feature in the future to provide a much more granular approach.

7. Long-term plans as well for monitoring third-party devices.

8. There will be official information on the Pro version of cnMaestro as it nears release this summer.