Hi extrands, we do appreciate candid feedback, so I'm really glad you took to the time to raise the visibility on this issue, which is at least partly a lack of context (our fault for sure) that I'll try to correct now. As you're well aware, a sizable portion of the top feature requests in ideation are related to the Orion alerting engine. It's really not surprising given the fundamental nature of that capability in NPM, SAM, and all our Orion platform based products. And as we thought about how to tackle all of these one-off feature requests, it became clear to us early last year that we'd only deliver fleeting happiness for everyone by continuing to address them one by one. The right answer, as daunting as it might have sounded at the time, was to take on alerting in the same way we had taken on web reporting. We needed do right by our customers and product and revamp the alerting engine, move it fully to the web, and make it dazzle you with its simplicity and ease of use, all while retaining all the goodness of the Advanced Alert Manager you have loved to love or loved to hate. This IS what we're working on. When Rob Hock, PM for the Orion platform returns from Cisco Live Australia, I'll make sure he loops you into those conversations. It's still early, but I think you'll be really excited about where we're heading!
With respect to the other feature requests and generally how we prioritize, I'd like to clarify that only a very small fraction of our roadmap is driven by what you would consider internally-generated enhancements and most of those are related to technical back-end issues that we believe will ultimately affect customers or community integration. The overwhelming majority of feature requests come from customers, whether they be prospects, existing customers, or non-customers. We have to listen to all three and as you've noted above, the prioritization exercise is never a fun one. We'd love to give everyone everything they want all the time, but if we could that, my team and I would likely be out of a job ;-).
I'm going to have Francois Caron, who runs our NetMan and Orion platform product teams, chime in as well on what we're working on. As he'll outline in his response, we're definitely listening, so please keep asking.