The big four take a similar approach to product delivery: You buy the individual management tools you need and plug them in to your overall solution. The big four vendors avoid using the term "framework" to describe their products because they want to shed the stigma of an overly complex and expensive management model. The big four want to show customers that the vendors' NSM components can function as standalone products and are becoming easier to deploy and manage. Nonetheless, I believe "framework" still accurately describes what these products do best: Manage complex heterogeneous environments.
BMC Software's PATROL
BMC Software's PATROL enterprise management products offer a centralized view of services and technology to help IT determine the components involved in an outage and respond quickly to maintain service levels. These products fully integrate with BMC Software's centralized management tool, PATROL Enterprise Manager (PATROL EM), although they can function with or without it. PATROL EM is a highly scalable management environment that offers real-time problem notification and escalation reporting through familiar communication methods, such as email or pager. PATROL EM automates tasks to speed the correlation of problems to the business services they affect and take corrective actions. It also integrates new management technologies with technologies from previous generations of framework-style management solutions and interoperates with other vendors' management applications, including those of the big four.
PATROL solutions use agents that run on managed systems. The agents gather base system data and data from installed knowledge modules, which monitor and manage specific applications or functional areas. For example, an agent on a managed server gathers information from the PATROL for Microsoft SQL Server Knowledge Module and uses it to report a variety of SQL Server performance metrics.
BMC Software offers management solutions for many products and platforms. The company also has tools specifically to allow multidirectional integration with large environments that use other vendors' NSM products. BMC Software offers its products on a sliding scale of manageability, letting organizations tailor the levels of server management they require to their business needs. For example, you might want to manage all aspects of the servers hosting your enterprise resource planning (ERP) or customer relationship management (CRM) applications. However, on a simple file server, you'll probably want to manage only the integral system components (e.g., memory, disk space, processor utilization). BMC Software offers PATROL Express for environments that don't require in-depth, end-to-end management. Aligning solutions to actual needs saves you time and money and lets you better direct management resources.
CA's Unicenter
CA, which has been in the IT management business since 1985, offers the broadest portfolio of NSM products of the big four. Its solutions span the enterprise computing landscape from mainframes to cell phones. CA believes that although the framework concept suited IT organizations in the 1990s, the complexities and costs of integrating disparate solutions make the framework idea obsolete. In 2001, CA began to revamp its solutions based on a modular and adaptive model that fits somewhere between point solutions and a centralized management umbrella.
CA's Unicenter Network and Systems Management solution comprises three main products: Unicenter 3.0 Network and Systems Management, Unicenter Advanced Network Operations, and Unicenter Performance Management. The products provide services such as network and systems management, automated operations, IT resource management, database management, Web infrastructure management, and application management.
Unicenter 3.0 Network and Systems Management oversees the health and availability of OSs. It also provides basic status management on all infrastructure elements, such as network devices, business applications, and database systems. You can use the product's integrated autodiscovery tools to build a system-elements database, which in turn populates 2-D and 3-D system-dynamic visualizations. The product uses agents to gather in-depth management information for many platforms, and you can use this information for real-time, historical, and predictive analysis.
Unicenter Advanced Network Operations discovers, monitors, visualizes, and diagnoses complex network infrastructures. It provides end-to-end management of heterogeneous networks, including LAN, Virtual LAN (VLAN), WAN, and switched environments. Unicenter Advanced Network Operations provides event correlation and advanced root-cause analysis, a feature that reports not only failures but also their causes. Unicenter Advanced Network Operations supports many network technologies, among them DECnet, IPX, SNA, and TCP/IP.
Unicenter Performance Management delivers comprehensive information about the overall IT infrastructure, including components such as servers, workstations, routers, hubs, switches, LAN segments, and WAN links. The product provides service metrics such as network response times, bandwidth utilization, and delays that you can analyze to determine the source of performance problems (e.g., application, file, Internet server, Web). You can monitor and measure user activity to help resolve current problems and prevent future ones through effective capacity planning.
HP OpenView
HP's NSM vision incorporates the common enterprise management theme of aligning IT services with business needs, which HP calls "adaptive enterprise." HP OpenView management products play a large part in realizing the company's adaptive enterprise strategy.
OpenView's centralized console component, OpenView Operations, runs on Windows and various other platforms. OpenView Operations centralizes the management of distributed e-business infrastructures by deploying an agent to collect management metrics—such as application, network, or database statistics—to managed devices. The agents then send the collected data to the main console for processing and management. One agent works across all platforms to collect what HP calls "50 golden metrics," which are consistent on all managed platforms. You can use smart plugins to gather additional, platform-specific metrics for environments such as Exchange and AD.
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