Whether your CFO's buzzword du jour is ROI or TCO, NSM (network and systems management) products must deliver immediate returns, or no sale. For an NSM vendor--or IT manager--to disregard this important metric is to risk being shown the door.
This means most organizations implement tactical management and, in response, vendors offer point solutions. Given that network and systems management encompasses the entire FCAPS (fault, configuration, accounting, performance and security) spectrum, the danger we see is further fracturing of management efforts, which will mean increased costs. Moreover, these vastly differing disciplines encompass a number of folks in the IT organization, so politics often gets mixed into the brew.
Spreading peace within IT despite organizational and cultural differences is not easy, especially when different tools present shared resources as if they were competing. But such is the price of a quick return in the NSM market.
For those of you pining for big-picture, strategic management behemoths, like those we tested for our comparative review of MoMs (managers of managers; see "Hot MoMs"), join the club--and be prepared to spend beaucoup bucks. Although 50 percent of CIOs surveyed in March by Aberdeen Group say they intend to purchase NSM applications in the next six to 12 months, the simplest MoM will cost $200,000 to get off the ground, plus $40,000 a year for maintenance and thousands of dollars for training, so these are still the purview of an elite group of enterprises.
Much more common are single-use products, most of which are performance-based. These gatherers of SNMP MIB II, Host and RMON usage and error statistics have become increasingly popular, thanks to their ability to work over a large range of networks and systems. In some cases the cost of these products is very low--you might even see a payback after only a few days.
But as useful as performance data is, it's just a piece of what you need to manage a complex network and its systems. The configuration portion of the FCAPS model is the key to getting a handle on a network but it's almost never part of big frameworks and has been difficult for performance vendors to back into, at least so far.
Thankfully, configuration products capable of functioning in the multivendor environment are starting to emerge. Our NSM Configuration Management Solution winner, Orchestream Service Activator, is an example.
Admittedly, these standalone products have far to go to be as easy to use and as useful as performance products, and they aren't part of any frameworks. But they will be, and when that day comes, network management TCO will be more than marketing hype 101.
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