Why I'm not deploying any more ePMP

Management tools are a critical point of value in everything that we do.  If the management tools continue to lack in critical areas the hardware costs us more.  I actually stopped deploying ePMP hardware about a year ago because of these issues.  

I attended one of the Cambium ePMP tour events in San Jose CA in 2015 and pushed the points below. I'm extremely disapointed that this basic fuctionality that was at that point even available in UBNT's AC1 still can't be managed to be made a priority in cnMaestro.

No ability to schedule firmware updates

http://community.cambiumnetworks.com/t5/Your-Ideas/Ability-to-schedule-software-updates-in-cnMaestro/idi-p/63452

https://community.cambiumnetworks.com/t5/cnMaestro/Ability-to-schedule-software-updates/m-p/80085#M2616

Planned for Q1 according to @Cambium_Rupam 11-05-2017

No functional alarming

https://community.cambiumnetworks.com/t5/cnMaestro/Email-alerts-for-outages/m-p/76922

Planned for Q4 according to @ashutoshdatta 08-13-2017

The graphing sucks.

No ability to drill down to a moment in time.

Yes, I can use a 3rd party NMS

I already do that, but dealing with different vendors ways/methods wastes a lot of time.  Sometimes a vendor-specific solution that does everything solves a lot of problems. 

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It's hard for me to find complaints about something that's being provided (at least for now) free of charge. To give some perspective, I just tried for a few days to get UBNT's UNMS system working and I just gave up... so now I'm back to AC2, which, has taken years for UBNT to get where it's at today, and it's still considered beta, and is in the throws of being replaced by UNMS. We use a variety of alarm and monitoring systems, including tools we've built in house, the aforementioned UBNT AC2, cnMaestro, Nagios, and SandVine. All have strengths and weaknesses.

Instead of being really angry at Cambium for not releasing features fast enough or on schedule, we simply rely on the systems we already have in place and are pleasantly surprised when some new functionality is introduced or bugs are fixed. The goal being that eventually we hope to use cnMaestro for a lot more then just pushing out mass config changes and mass firmware updates. We're not holding our breath for scheduled updates to cnMaestro (or the ePMP AC line) and we're not stopping our installations either. Try to have some patience... just do what you gotta do in the mean time with whatever platform(s) work for you today.

There is something good in all seeming failures. You are not to see that now. Time will reveal it. Be patient.

- Swami Sivananda

2 Likes

I'm certainly not complaining about the price - though I would gladly pay for it if it met my needs - simply the need of what I think are critical features that have been tacitly promised and so far not delivered.