Over the last week, I have been testing the CA Server management and CMDB product, as well as Bladelogic. Both products are good, but have their downsides. I am evaluating 4 products, and narrowing it down to 2 in order to deploy on a real QA/staging environment. The criteria we are testing on are as follows, each has a weight as well. More later:
Requirement | Sub-Feature |
Network Option | |
Track network device configuration | |
Create policy for configuration standards | |
CMDB | |
Visualize relationships between servers | |
Visualize relationships between server and network | |
Track dependencies of servers and websites | |
Software Deployment | |
Support for MSI, RPM, and Sun Packages | |
GUI for creating Packages | |
Search and replace | |
Reverse engineer files into packages | |
Rollback | |
Notifications via SNMP and SMTP | |
Download patches, deploy, and rollback patches | |
Create a policy of patches | |
Hardware asset collection | |
Collect data via DMI | |
Collect detailed information | |
Software asset collection | |
Collect software revision and install details | |
Collect how often and for how long software is used | |
Reporting capability | |
Export to PDF,XLS | |
Report on compliance, changes, and activity | |
Open database with views that make it easy to query | |
Multiple Datacenter capability | |
Ability to have proxies in datacenters/envs | |
Ability to have decentralized control over envs | |
PXE deployment | |
Provision OS and policy in one job | |
Monitor and track configuration/policy | |
Create policy off Live including patches and settings | |
Track compliance to the policy | |
Enforce the policy | |
Track changes made outside the product | |
Prevent the execution of a specific exe or file | |
Manage users and services | |
Manage local users across servers | |
Replicate credentials to other servers | |
Manage services in real-time | |
Verify status of services in real-time across servers | |
Verify services port usage | |
Usability | |
How easy is the product to administrate | |
How easy is the product to use | |
How easy is the product to configure and setup |
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