Some time ago I sent a msg to these lists about what system/network
monitoring/management tools folks were using. I received several responses,
and am doing a long overdue summary here.
CA Unicenter TNG -
"heavily based on SNMP, but it is also a very very
expensive product. Robust, but expensive And a pain in the _at_$$ to install :-)"
"Solstice Symon 2.0 and Computer Associates Unicenter TNG are the two I use"
"You could use CA Unicenter or Tivoli for this. They have good SNMP
management across almost all hardware platforms. However, these would turn
out to be quite expensive for the initial purchase, initial implementation
and support. In case you need only event management, you could consider BMC
Patrol"
HP OpenView [contains a lot of packages for various applications]
[NOTE - I can't find much support in OpenView for Tru64Unix. It does support
NT and Sun. It appears some apps *HAVE* to run on an HP machine as the server]
"Our support department are using HP I.T. Operations Centre (otherwise known
as ITO). There are DUNIX agents which report to the HP monitoring front
end. I don't know much about it but it does appear to work."
" The second thing I would go to is HP OpenView. Very easy to install, and
not too expensive. You'll have more flexability with OpenView"
MRTG -
http://ee-staff.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/mrtg/mrtg.html
"not commercial...but I've heard great things about MRTG. Many people have
integrated it into Big Brother for a complete systems and network monitoring
tool. I use Big Brother and plan to integrate it as well.
BTW, Big Brother is free too. It's at
http://MacLawran.ca/bb-dnld/
I'm not affiliated, just been very happy with the tool."
[another mention of mrtg, plus a different site:
http://mrtg.hdl.com/mrtg.html ]
"First thing I would try is MRTG. It's free, and quite robust."
Tibco HAWK
"Tibco has a package name HAWK which allows you to do a lot of
customizations. Works quite well. However, its rather new product. The
application is built on TIBCOS. RV protocol ( realtime )."
Cabletron's Spectrum
Chipcom's (3COM's) OnDemand NCS
"We've played with a couple - Digital serverworks and Chipcom's (3COM's)
OnDemand NCS. The Digital serverworks we're just starting on but it
doesn't seem to do remote management (so far!) it just displays the
network, various network traps (events), etc. The Chipcom stuff is old,
but it worked great - you could reboot hubs, download software to hubs,
push the buttons on the hubs remotely, etc..."
[A rather extensive commentary on various packages came from David Hull -
thanks!]
"I'm still working on that project, but here are some thoughts:
* Our Alphas came with Digital's ServerWorks, which does a pretty good
job at Network Management. It recognizes pretty much all Compaq/Digital
equipment, and comes with MIBs for lots of other stuff as well. It will
accept SNMP traps from anything. In place of that however, I'm going to put
in HP's Network Node Manager 6.0. The one difference between ServerWorks
and NNM 6 is that NNM 6 will store all of it's data in an Oracle database
(NNM 5 won't do this, which is why I specify NNM 6). That way, we can
archive stuff and do historical/trend analysis, reporting, etc. ServerWorks
stores it's data in an Access database, so it's not very scalable. Also,
ServerWorks is Windows-only, and it's not a lights-out application - you
must be logged in to your Windows box and have it up and running on the
screen. NNM, on the other hand, will run on NT, Solaris or HP-UX.
* Compaq has it's free Insight Manager, which is about the best thing
on the Intel/NT side. It's a very solid product, but it just monitors
Compaq hardware. Compaq is in the process of merging Insight Manager and
ServerWorks, but it looks like that's going to be slow going. The next
version of Insight Manager, 4.22, which is supposed to be out any day and
downloadable from
http://www.compaq.com/products/servers/management/dl-cim.html will include
support for Digital UNIX 4.0F. Don't know if you'll be able to install the
agents on 4.0E or earlier.
* Digital UNIX 4.x comes with Performance Manager (on the Associated
Products #2 CD). It's free for monitoring servers locally. You can monitor
all of your DU boxes from a central station, but that requires a license, as
does TruCluster monitoring. It looks to be a pretty good product. It's
written in tcl, and you can add your own custom scripts to it. You can set
threshholds and define actions to be triggered when threshholds are met,
such as paging, email, or sending an SNMP trap to a ServerWorks console,
which can in turn do it's own alerting. You can find more information on
this at
http://www.unix.digital.com/unix/sysman/perf_mgr/
* We don't have any other UNIXes of any concern here, but before on
Solaris and HP/UX, I've always used the HP OpenView suite (IT/O, Network
Node Manager, MeasureWare, Perf, Glance, etc...). Costly though.
* On the NT side, the next version of Insight Manager is supposed to
bundle the BMC Patrol agents for OS-monitoring (no application monitoring),
but I understand they're going to be very limited versions at that. I
believe I'm going to go with HP OpenView's ManageX 4.1, since it will work
well with NNM. NT has SNMP capabilities in the OS, and you could just use
those to send traps to your Network Management package, but I want
service-level monitoring. 'Course, if you were ambitious, you could always
write some perl scripts to parse the NT Event Log and send relevant SNMP
traps that the OS doesn't do. I've done this before and it works pretty
well.
* If you have HP NT servers, HP's TopTools package, which is free, is
very good as well. Most hardware vendors will have some sort of free
hardware monitoring package which you can use to integrate into your overall
SNMP infrastructure."
Received on Thu May 13 1999 - 15:40:09 NZST