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IBM POTs

This week we were offsite at the tech center in NYC for a day trip. We looked at IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager (TPM), the provisioning, deployment product. It is one of the products we are considering standardizing on. I wanted to get clear picture of what it can and cannot do versus Opsware SAS. The product looks good, but I still need to write up the full gap analysis. It definitely would meet most of our patching, inventory, and deployment requirements, but it doesn't fill the system administration, or complex audit and control requirements we are given due to customer audits and regulatory compliance.

Last week IBM brought us a POC for IBM Tivoli Monitoring (ITM), which is the monitoring platform. It compares to HP Openview Operations (OVO). We are going to bring it in house to do more testing, but upon the initial 1 day with the product, we found the following comparison to be true:


 

Issues in POC:

  1. Multiple times the agent died, and the server died. There was no indication of the error aside from a manual restart.
  2. Did not go over agent installation.

Environment:

    Pros to ITM:

  1. Reporting is nicer, and based on open standards.
  2. Multiple server roll into a single TEMS easier than OVO.
  3. More flexible on operating system, database and platform the components can run on.
  4. IBM is quicker to support new component versions (OS, Application server, etc)

    Cons to ITM:

  1. Email management for notifications outside of event escalation are not manageable aside from using command line calls with emails as arguments.
  2. Scenarios applied to groups are not easily manageable, meaning you have to manage the policy in a lot of notifications.
  3. UI is not as easy to use, there are fewer wizards to guide the engineer with the workflow of making a change or implementing something new.
  4. Everything seems to run as a separate agent. So you will have a Windows OS agent, a Universal Agent, and a Custom Agent etc, with all of them running as separate services and processes.

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