I love the instrumentation Cisco puts into devices. For the most part, the info I need is there (QoS drop data in switches being the exception). But there's no tools to get all that info OUT easily. And the ones that do, cost an order of magnitude too much. (Self-fulfilling prophecy of small number of sales?)

Cisco's current own-product and partner strategy involves way too many tools and complexity, at far too high a cost. Of course, that matches the industry, which has never exactly set itself stretch goals.

What about tools that just work, don't need a lot of tweaking, and incorporate knowledge of what to poll for, how often, and what are note-worthy thresholds? (CiscoWorks DFM has some of this knowledge under the hood, but the UI is execrable.)

Even for the top 100 companies in the country, the costs and complexity are too high (and I've worked with a couple).

I liked seeing the remark about Apple (which used to have a UI evangelist). Right now, Cisco's UI's look like a best effort from say Intel -- companies that do chipset level coding well just seem culturally to not do GUI well. B- grade at best.

I've taught and consulted on CiscoWorks for 12 years, including the fugly old Unix version. Cisco's tools, especially CiscoWorks have ease of install and patch problems, ease of discovery / start-up problems, ease of use and user interface problems, and in particular robustness problems. It's not THAT terrible, a B or a B-, it can be made to work and can be useful, but as the comments posted indicate, it just turns people off.

The most common problem I've seen with CiscoWorks is slowness, usually due to trashed DB. Re-install or restore from clean backup -- which nobody ever has -- and the problems go away. Gee, can't the programmers make the DB self-repairing or provide good cleanup tools?

There's just little stuff that's overlooked. Another company's tool, click a button, it delivers me a named and time-stamped ZIP of configs on my desktop. In CW, you have to turn on the shadow dir, then go on the server to ZIP the files, then transfer to PC. "It's more secure" is what I was told when I suggested improving this. Fine, make my life easier, then give me a security option to turn that off.

Reselling partner products that cost way too much is not a solution, it is a surrender, giving up. It does have lower R&D costs :-)

What about tools from companies like SolarWinds, Netcordia, NetVoyant, Zenoss that actually do a bunch of things out of the box, simply? Of course, most of those aren't really cheap either, anymore. (Price tends to go up as the functionality and customer base grow.)