List out all the things you want to monitor. Give them a priority 1-5 and then find the tool/tools that best match your needs. NetIQ is great stuff but may be overkill for what you need. You'll also have to look and see if you want to implement a "framework" solution or go "best of breed" for the service that you want to monitor. The biggest benefit of the framework is that it can provide event correlation between multiple services (network, SQL, Exchange, DNS) the biggest drawback is that you have to customize the heck out of it to get it to work. Someone else here mentioned Tivoli and they are right on the mark about how expensive it can be to implement. Estimate costs to be between 3 to 6 times of the purchase price.
The benefits you get from best of breed providers is that you can rely more on their expertise in the application to give you greater functionality out of the box. They also can provide more in depth information in there monitoring. Typically, the framework providers (CA, BMC, Tivoli, HP) only can give you event driven reactions. i.e. the service is stopped, restart or CPU utilization has reached 95%, send an alert. What they don't do well at all is give you historical performance and capacity information. As the trend to consolidate services onto fewer machines grows, it becomes more and more important to have this information. It will help you prevent problems before they appear, and give you real numbers to justify purchasing new hardware. -----Original Message----- From: Bryan Schlegel [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, January 10, 2002 12:41 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [ActiveDir] Server availibility/monitoring/management tools I am just a little weary of installing free monitoring software on my servers, you have to do a lot of customization for this product too. Have you ever run into any issues with the client nodes on your servers? -----Original Message----- From: Joseph Liggett [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, January 10, 2002 12:25 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [ActiveDir] Server availibility/monitoring/management tools I use big brother, cause i can use it to monitor all kinds of servers and services. It has a great web interface, it keeps logs and can be configured to be interactive. go to www.bb4.com. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Abbiss, Mark Sent: Thursday, January 10, 2002 8:46 AM To: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' Subject: [ActiveDir] Server availibility/monitoring/management tools Does anyone have any strong recommendations for a good Windows 2K server monitoring/management tool ? We are ideally looking for something that can monitor a range of running services and server availability and take remedial action if anything goes wrong (restart server or service) and notify support staff by email, SMS or pager. A flexible reporting tool that can be directly accessed via a browser is also required. Have looked at NetIQ but it is SO expensive ! Regards, Mark Abbiss List info : http://www.activedir.org/mail_list.htm List FAQ : http://www.activedir.org/list_faq.htm List archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/activedir%40mail.activedir.org/ List info : http://www.activedir.org/mail_list.htm List FAQ : http://www.activedir.org/list_faq.htm List archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/activedir%40mail.activedir.org/ List info : http://www.activedir.org/mail_list.htm List FAQ : http://www.activedir.org/list_faq.htm List archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/activedir%40mail.activedir.org/ List info : http://www.activedir.org/mail_list.htm List FAQ : http://www.activedir.org/list_faq.htm List archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/activedir%40mail.activedir.org/
