Furthermore, these products must be portable--pushed to customers via Web consoles. In the usability category, we found Managed Objects' Formula's innovative GUI to be especially useful, though this factor didn't make up for some of the product's shortcomings.
The massive number of events created by networked devices and applications requires a robust architecture. Architectural considerations include how distributed and redundant the system is and, of particular importance for a MoM, the ability to integrate into third-party management products. All the products offer distributed processing and redundancy, letting them scale, but both Micromuse Netcool and BMC Patrol Enterprise Manager had distributed engines for filtering event streams close to the event source.
The issue of price is always important, especially with a product class of this magnitude. These products typically set an enterprise back by hundreds of thousands of dollars. That said, any product's ability to reach across the network and application management silos makes the cost reasonable if the application's downtime has enough dollar impact to justify these heavyweights.
We set up two scenarios--one a single site with 5,000 managed entities, and the other a huge organization with more than 100,000 entities contained in 500 branch offices and five regional offices. In calculating total cost of ownership, we included the manufacturer's suggested retail price, maintenance fees, professional services and training expenses (see MoM pricing chart).
Best price? Aprisma's Spectrum xsight for a single site: $66,000 plus $13,200 annual maintenance, with training included. Curiously, Aprisma rang up the highest price in our multisite scenario: $468,000 plus $93,600 annual maintenance and $1,925 per user for three days of training. Unlike the other vendors, Aprisma recommended deploying servers at each of the sites in the second scenario, whereas the competitors say they would locate their servers centrally.
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