What's New in This Release:

· User Roles & Permissions, Plus Pass-through Authentication with Active Directory: Cirrus v4 enables multiple user accounts to be created with different privileges. This ability offers an additional layer of security by ensuring that particular activities are performed only by the individuals who have appropriate permissions. Additionally, Cirrus can now leverage your existing Active Directory® infrastructure for user account authentication and password management.
· Device Login Credentials: Cirrus also enables you to create device login credentials – a feature that is normally reserved for those expensive NCCM solutions that will add at least one extra zero to your bill. This feature allows you to better track who made configuration changes to ensure policy adherence and to aid in troubleshooting network issues.
· User Activity Tracking: With the latest version of Cirrus, you can view who made configuration changes, who backed up configurations, and when users logged in and out of Cirrus. This user activity tracking ability ensures compliance with federal regulations, such as HIPAA and PCI, while also enabling you to provide necessary documentation for external and internal audits. Additionally, activity tracking makes it quick and easy to determine who made what changes when diagnosing a network problem.
· Immediate Device Remediation: With Cirrus’ new streamlined device remediation feature, you can automatically remediate any policy violations right from your configuration policy management reports. By simply right-clicking on a policy violation within the report interface, it’s easy to immediately apply a remediation script to repair any devices that were found to be in violation with policies. In doing so, Cirrus streamlines the configuration policy verification and remediation process for HIPAA, PCI, and other regulations.
· Support for SNMP v3: Cirrus now fully supports SNMP v3, enabling you to collect node and inventory information using this secure communications protocol. You can also upload and download configurations from Cisco® devices using SNMP v3. While SNMP v3 support is typically reserved for high-end NCCM solutions, Cirrus brings this important security feature to the mid-market.
· Integration with Thwack: Cirrus v4 offers direct access to Thwack, SolarWinds user community website. Links to Thwack are located throughout the Cirrus application, enabling you to leverage the expertise of an extensive community of network engineers who are highly skilled with SolarWinds products. Integration between Cirrus and Thwack makes it quick and effortless to post a question or search for answers in the Thwack forums. Additionally, you can easily search Thwack for device templates, scripts, and other useful Cirrus customizations.
· Unmanage Devices: With version 4, Cirrus can now maintain a list of “unmanaged” devices – devices that are recognized in the application, but cannot be managed. You can designate devices as “unmanaged” to maintain the configuration history for devices that have been decommissioned or removed from the network, which is helpful if you need to maintain a historical record of all configuration changes that have been made on the network. This feature also makes it easier to specify devices discovered by the Orion Network Discovery tool which you don’t wish to manage with Cirrus.... [ read full changelog ]