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Top 10 Enterprise Management Tools

Posted by Michael Biddick on March 3, 2008

Tags: CMDB,  ITSM workflow,  all-in-one management appliance,  application discovery mapping,  business intelligence,  consolidated event management,  network & systems configuration management,  network fault/performance management,  process automation,  process best practice,  service desk,  service impact monitoring,  vendor consolidation,  Applications Protections and Patching,  Backup & Recovery,  Business/Finance/Careers,  Data Center Access,  Data Networking & Management,  Data Protection,  Data Recovery,  Data Security,  Disaster Planning and Recovery ,  Enterprise Software,  Financial Services,  Hotspots,  Infrastructure,  Network Management Software,  Network Security,  Other,  Patch Management,  Security Standards,  Server Protections and Patching,  Servers & Storage,  Service Management,  Software,  Software and Web Development,  Systems Management,  Technology,  WLAN Security,  Wireless,  Wireless PBXs,  enterprise management

Channel: Data Protection, Networking & Mgmt, Other, Servers & Storage, Wireless

Although large enterprise software vendors gobble up small ones, and even midsize vendors use acquisitions as a growth strategy, few organizations embrace single-vendor enterprise management. Those that do are often compelled by global sourcing and procurement arrangements that may not allow for a best-of-breed technology focus. We're here to help change this state of affairs. Of course, creating a Top 10 list is never easy, and this one won't apply to everyone: Different products cater to specific markets, and detailed requirements may cause an organization to favor a particular vendor. Price also is a factor. If you decide to buy at the end of a vendor's fiscal year, however, it might offer you a good enough deal that you can overlook a few shortfalls, or reach for a product you didn't think you could afford.

But enough caveats. To choose our Top 10 enterprise management tools, we divided the space into functional areas. Together, they represent the critical aspects of any truly comprehensive management infrastructure. We set out to pick systems that can scale in an enterprise environment and have the features needed to scale with a dynamic, growing organization.

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Area #1: Network Fault & Performance Management

Product: CA eHealth & Spectrum

Why We Love It: CA's eHealth & Spectrum, purchased from Concord in 2005, is a powerful one-two punch in the battle to ensure network availability and performance. While Concord eHealth was in the past dinged for a lack of customization and problems with scalability, CA has really stepped up to the plate and addressed these concerns while maintaining the product's ease of usability.

While other tools are strong in this market, CA balances scalability with maintainability to make eHealth something customers can maintain without an army of staff. It can manage a diverse collection of devices and isolate the source of performance degradation throughout the network. This will help enterprises minimize recurring WAN issues and provide consistent reporting across a heterogeneous infrastructure. Spectrum enables automated Layer 2/3 network discovery, monitoring, topology mapping, and root-cause analysis. As network events are received via SNMP traps, polling, or syslog, Spectrum can compare events to the topology model and determine relationships based on containment, connectivity, and reachability. Spectrum provides granular Layer 2/3 visibility down to the individual port and circuit for LAN, WAN, wired, wireless, physical, and virtual networks. It doesn't matter if you have ATM, Frame Relay, IP multicast, QoS, VoIP, or VPN technologies -- CA can monitor it all. Because eHealth and report-exception alarms are integrated seamlessly into Spectrum, you have everything you need, all in one screen.

Area #:2 Consolidated Event Management
Product: IBM/Netcool

Why we love it: Under the Micromuse banner, Netcool has been one of the best-kept secrets of the telecom market for more than 10 years. Netcool OmniBus provides a consolidated view of enterprisewide events as well as status information. It collects event streams from just about any device (some joke that even toasters can be managed by Netcool) and presents a single, consistent view of the current state of all managed systems. It then distributes event information to the operators and administrators responsible for monitoring service levels, using Web-based consoles. For organizations with several different management platforms, Netcool can act as an overall manager of managers. The architecture of the product has allowed network operations departments to keep their network-centric services up and running 24/7 and it is used in NOCs around the world, regardless of network size and complexity. Netcool's ability to scale as networks expand truly separates it from the pack.

Netcool was designed specifically for IT service providers, such as xSPs, long-distance and local-exchange carriers, mobile service providers, and cable TV operators. ObjectServer is the core component of the Netcool application. It is a high-speed memory-resident database that collects fault information from throughout the network infrastructure and allows operators to create relationships between faults and the availability of network-based business services. Netcool collects fault and status data from a variety of network devices and management environments; these include SNMP devices, servers, mainframes, x86 systems, applications, circuit switches, voice switches, IP routers, and network management applications and frameworks, among many others. Enterprises will find Netcool a lifesaver when it comes to reducing the number of management screens that must be monitored.

Area #3: Service Impact Monitoring
Product: IBM/Tivoli Business Service Manager and Service Level Advisor

Why We Love it: Events are great, but if you need to manage the ongoing health of services, processes, transactions, missions, and business activities, take a look at TBSM. After you define your service scorecards, KPIs, and SLA metrics, TBSM will help manage them, using Tivoli or just about any other NSM suite to provide data. IBM also uses a federated model to update service maps, so you can rely on an application discovery mapping or CMDB tool to populate needed information. Role-based views provide flexible and customizable visualization dashboards that can be defined based on user perspective, while scorecards automatically track the impact of issues in real time. Service status is calculated based on an understanding of service dependencies and behaviors, and TBSM works to pinpoint the actual impact of problems on overall service availability, performance, integrity and business activities.

This vendor-independent system can identify the specific causes of service problems across operational silos and dependencies, providing faster cross-domain resolution. A dynamic federated information model provides a flexible and standard way to map dependency information into a common data model. TBSM correlates underlying infrastructure elements needed for service modeling. By actively collecting dependency information from distributed and host-based data sources in real time, you get a true picture of the health of the overall service. Define SLAs with a wizard interface and manage via executive dashboard, and away you go.

Area #:4: Application Discovery Mapping
Product: Tideway Foundation

Why We Love It: A big complaint around service impact monitoring -- Area #3 -- is that creation of services or maps requires manually modeling every single service. As the environment changes, these maps need to be updated again, manually. This isn't sustainable for enterprises of any size without an army of staff. Tideway Foundation automatically generates detailed business application dependency maps and populates them into your service impact monitoring tool. This speeds initial rollout and improves maintainability of the service impact monitor. Better yet, Foundation continually monitors the IT environment, detecting changes and automatically updating service maps. Bingo!

In addition to traditional applications, the product also can manage virtualized server environments. By mapping virtual servers to their physical hosts, end-to-end application dependencies remain clear. Dependency visualizations support change-impact analysis, reducing system outages and increasing service availability. Foundation also can help isolate the root cause of problems by mapping applications to the underlying physical and virtual infrastructure, thus identifying dependencies. Using Foundation's visual dependency maps, applications and stakeholders can be rapidly identified, improving communications and ensuring that appropriate resources are applied to reduce the overall mean-time-to-repair. Fixes now can be prioritized based on the criticality of the affected business process, minimizing the cost of outages and speeding recovery time.

Overall, a boatload of time can be saved, especially in large environments. Tideway can help organizations have confidence in their service maps and find root causes of outages quickly and efficiently while decreasing operational costs.