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F E A T U R E

Hot MoMs

August 5, 2002
By Bruce Boardman

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MoM Features

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	In this article
	Introduction
	MoM Features
	Managing the App Gap
	Executive Summary

MoMs are event managers. If they can alert IT about an outage before a user or a customer calls, that's a win. This sounds like a no-brainer, but wading through thousands of events is akin to searching for a needle in a haystack. Such event management isn't enough; event reporting requires diagnostics to shorten downtime. Most MoMs call for heavy front-end implementation and a fair amount of rigor, procedure and discipline to achieve that goal.

Managing events was a huge part of the early MoM's job, necessitating the development of special techniques. Decreasing the mammoth number of events was one strategy. Methods such as deduplication and event damping reduced recurring events to a single line on the console.

Automation further reduced the number of events that required a response. The idea was to build rules that, when met, triggered some action. Simple rules required identification of an action that would occur based on a particular event, such as mounting and assigning tapes when a file arrived.

Interevent rules, which specify multiple triggers and actions, advanced the MoMs further. A prime example of such a rule is the suppression of events for the loss of contact between a router and downstream devices. If an interface is disabled, and the device is a router, ignore or trash any events arising from devices that cannot be contacted because they are attached to said router.

In a router's case, the relationship between the attached downstream devices and the router's failed interface is understood based on Layer 3 addressing. That is, the subnets supported by the router will be down when the router is down. With processes that run on separate servers, clients, switches and other equipment, the old MoMs' rules would become too brittle, requiring too much upkeep to make the automation provided worth the effort.

The new MoMs still handle event management--in many cases, better than ever. But they need to do more. The ultimate MoM has a clue to errors' origins and can take a corrective action automatically.

Management = Money

Unfortunately, MoMs cost a small fortune to implement. The simplest MoM is going to run about $200,000 to get off the ground, with an additional $40,000 a year for maintenance and several thousand dollars for training. This is on top of the purchase, implementation and maintenance costs for the management domain you're using.

More complicated scenarios will cost even more: $500,000 would be realistic for a large organization with, say, 100,000 managed entities in 500 offices across the country.

It's obvious that the more complex the organization, the less the proportional cost in comparison with the overall IT budget, assuming a higher IT budget as complexity rises. For this reason, large, complex organizations will reap MoMs' benefits more easily than small ones. For more on the costs, see the pricing chart.