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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