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Ask questions when selecting a network management system

By Brad Reese on Sun, 02/24/2008 - 7:22pm.

From time to time one hears of companies spending big bucks on a network management solution (aka NMS).

Hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars spent on a network management system that often fails to get fully deployed.

Perhaps asking a few questions in the selection process would have been helpful.

For a network management system to work you must ask your team before getting started:

What do we need?

List the requirements out so that everyone can review them:

	Application monitoring.
	Reactive insight into network traffic.
	Syslog and event log monitoring and reporting.
	Notification when critical devices or applications fail.
	Performance trend information on latency - utilization and availability.

Consultants advise building the above list before speaking with NMS vendors who may try to sell you on what they think is important.

Sometimes vendors do add good legitimate ideas to your list, but other times a vendor may mislead and distract your team from its list with unimportant features.

For example, a vendor may push features such as event correlation and transaction monitoring, which may require you to keep the vendor from distracting your team from its list.

Questions to ask a Network Management System Vendor:

1.	What is application monitoring to your company? Syslog, event log? SNMP or WMI for CPU, Memory, and hard drive space monitoring? Synthetic transaction monitoring to check processes? Does the solution require loading an agent on the servers? Can it trend availability of all monitors? Can it trend response time of all monitors?
2.	What features are from an OEM relationship? How long has the OEM been in place?
3.	How does the product respond to adds, moves and changes? Are all monitors removed when one IP address is deleted and do the corresponding polling dependencies also get cleaned up automatically? How do you find out what needs to be cleaned up, does the product tell you?
4.	Who are your competitors?
5.	What is the average customer purchase price? Provide 3 references in the past 6 months who have purchased. Provide 3 references in the past 2 years who have purchased.
6.	How many polling / transactions can a single server handle?
7.	How many servers, routers, switches, end systems can a single system handle?
8.	How many days to roll out the total solution for your network and how many people are necessary?

"Over the years, we have seen dozens of companies overspend on a network management solution that doesn’t get used," said Michael Patterson - CEO of Plixer International.

"Management continues to pay maintenance fees as they fear the embarrassment of telling executives about their poor decision and waste of IT budgets."

Generally, everything you want to do can be done with a low cost alternative.

Where the cheaper tools lack feature sets, they make up for it with open architectures which allow for simple and easy to use integration with 3rd party products.

In conclusion:

Ask questions when selecting a network management system, it may help you avoid letting your investment become shelfware.

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