Very Computer

by **Yousuf Kha** » Fri, 10 Jan 1997 04:00:00

Hello,

We have a mixed environment of Suns, SGIs, and HPs. The biggest group
are the Suns, and there are several of them running several different
versions of Solaris, ranging from 2.4 to 2.5.1. The SGIs are running
Irix 5.3. And there is one HP 712 workstation running HPUX 9.03.

Okay, now that we've described the environment we have to work with,
this is what we want to do. We want to get some recommendations on
server/network management software. There seems to be a bewildering
array of available choices, and we're not entirely sure what we want it
to do for us. In general, we want it to warn of low disk space, cpu and
i/o load averages, number of processes, there's going to be some servers
with Sybase on them, and we'd like it to log and graph any of this data
and be managed from a single remote control machine.

We'd like an opinion on these specific products: a) Tivoli, b) BMC
Patrol, c) HP OpenView, d) Solstice Management Suite, e) CA Unicenter,
and f) anything else you can think of.

Some of these products don't seem to be in competition with each other,
but are rather complementary products, designed to be plugins for the
other products mentioned up above. This is confusing, as we said, we're
not entirely sure of where to start and how things fit with each other.
We preferably want a single solution, without having to buy pieces from
several independent vendors.

Now, few specific questions:

-Do the two products created by the workstation manufacturers (HP
Openview and Sun Solstice) support other platforms besides their own.
For example is there an HP Openview for Sun, or a Solstice for IRIX? If
this is going to present a problem, I'll just let you know that we
consider the Suns more important to find a solution for, over the SGI or
HP boxes, since we have so many more of them. There's only two SGI
boxes, and one HP box, but dozens of Sun boxes.

-I've used BMC Patrol (briefly) in the past. As far as I recall, Patrol
installs a whole bunch of daemons into each machine, and this by itself
can lead to serious depletion of resources on each machine. The resource
monitoring utilities are themselves causing the resources to go down, in
other words. It could've been a bug in the version I used back then, or
it could be still there as a problem. Can anybody with BMC care to
elaborate on what problems they had?

-what is best to use for cross-platform compatibility?

Yousuf Khan

by **Doug Barne** » Tue, 21 Jan 1997 04:00:00

> Hello,

> We have a mixed environment of Suns, SGIs, and HPs. The biggest group
> are the Suns, and there are several of them running several different
> versions of Solaris, ranging from 2.4 to 2.5.1. The SGIs are running
> Irix 5.3. And there is one HP 712 workstation running HPUX 9.03.

> Okay, now that we've described the environment we have to work with,
> this is what we want to do. We want to get some recommendations on
> server/network management software. There seems to be a bewildering
> array of available choices, and we're not entirely sure what we want it
> to do for us. In general, we want it to warn of low disk space, cpu and
> i/o load averages, number of processes, there's going to be some servers
> with Sybase on them, and we'd like it to log and graph any of this data
> and be managed from a single remote control machine.

> We'd like an opinion on these specific products: a) Tivoli, b) BMC
> Patrol, c) HP OpenView, d) Solstice Management Suite, e) CA Unicenter,
> and f) anything else you can think of.

> Some of these products don't seem to be in competition with each other,
> but are rather complementary products, designed to be plugins for the
> other products mentioned up above. This is confusing, as we said, we're
> not entirely sure of where to start and how things fit with each other.
> We preferably want a single solution, without having to buy pieces from
> several independent vendors.

> Now, few specific questions:

> -Do the two products created by the workstation manufacturers (HP
> Openview and Sun Solstice) support other platforms besides their own.
> For example is there an HP Openview for Sun, or a Solstice for IRIX? If
> this is going to present a problem, I'll just let you know that we
> consider the Suns more important to find a solution for, over the SGI or
> HP boxes, since we have so many more of them. There's only two SGI
> boxes, and one HP box, but dozens of Sun boxes.

> -I've used BMC Patrol (briefly) in the past. As far as I recall, Patrol
> installs a whole bunch of daemons into each machine, and this by itself
> can lead to serious depletion of resources on each machine. The resource
> monitoring utilities are themselves causing the resources to go down, in
> other words. It could've been a bug in the version I used back then, or
> it could be still there as a problem. Can anybody with BMC care to
> elaborate on what problems they had?

> -what is best to use for cross-platform compatibility?

> Yousuf Khan

Many of these have add ons for other platforms. You need to REALLY
decide what it is you want metrics for and THEN find the one closest to
what you need. OpenView seems to have a lot out of the box for HP
systems as fas as system metrics. Tivoli needs addons for most all
systems (or you script your own), I would assume Solstice does a good
job on the Suns. You will undoubtely need to write some scripts of your
own and send the info to the agent on the machine to be monitored. I
think you will really need to do this for the SGI boxes. You will need
to have some decent admins around to help with this task as well as
writting scripts to monitor any log files you might want to keep track
of. THEN you need to decide if things like network management and
software distribution are things your interested in (and don't forget
the servers/support/... for the machines this will run on). Most of
these packages monitoring a fair amount of machines (10-20) will require
a dedicated box (especially if it's used as a software depot).

The agents (daemons) are part of the deal. You could write some things
in shell (Perl/C or whatever) and use cron to "look around" every so
often but if you want quasi-real time monitoring you will have to use
the agents.

It's a complicated thing that you need MONEY and STAFF to implement in a
way that could possibly pay for itself one day.

GOOD LUCK!!!

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