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Rolling Review: Symantec i3, ASD and Insight Inquire: Page 2 of 4

Indepth provides drill-down capability to perform analysis from alert to root cause. Once a problem is detected, Inform/Alerts has significant customization capabilities for specifying which alerts should be e-mailed, and where. Additionally, we could customize the severity of alerts and the monitors that create them.

Inform/Alerts also contains SNMP trap forwarding integration, and we could set up log scraping to create SNMP traps for applications that don't support the protocol. Inform/Foresight can produce predictive analysis, but it also generates standard reports and enables customization. All reports are clearly laid out and can be generated for varied times, instances or groups.

After setup, our SQL Inform/Alerts instance showed critical alerts within minutes. These included databases not having been properly backed up and the SQL Server agent not running correctly. Within a few days, the Web alerts indicated critical warnings for large numbers of connections from a single IP, indicating a potential security threat.


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ASD is a highly customizable dashboard with the ability to integrate Symantec and non-Symantec data—organizations will want to add it. to get the true value across infrastructure components. It can generate reports from across technology groups that are segregated within i3, as well as view Insight Inquire data. Because it has its own user and group configurations, it can restrict access to datasets and individual dashboard portlets without users having access to i3.

Symantec's was one of the most cost-effective entries from the larger enterprise vendors in this Rolling Review. Pricing for i3 is based on management station CPUs, not on the number of end-device technologies that are managed, so our price as tested was only $17,200. Price per CPU, per managed technology is about $2,000. For example, i3 for SQL Server is $2,100/CPU. This allows organizations to get their feet wet with Symantec without buying an expensive central management station as a minimum investment. ASD is free with any i3 bundle and Portlet Packs will run about 1,000 per user per pack.