Wrestling the NT management octopus

Managing a large group of Windows NT Servers is sometimes like wrestling an octopus. You don't have enough arms and legs to put up a good fight, and every time you think you've gotten ahead, another tentacle grabs you by the ankles and pulls you down.

We can't give you more arms and legs, but we have found a product that can help you win the NT Server management battle. Mission Critical Software's brand new product, OnePoint Operations Manager, provides NT administrators with a stable and highly scalable centralized management platform for event monitoring and alerting across their NT deployments. Its performance was good enough to earn our World Class Award.

ActiveAgent technology is what makes Operations Manager so effective. ActiveAgents installed on each server report performance thresholds, service status changes and extract information from NT event logs.

Operations Manager can dynamically discover new servers based on defined scanning rules and install ActiveAgents on them. Out of the box, Operations Manager scans the configured list of NT domains at 2:05 a.m., but you can easily change that scheduled scan time. On our network, the scheduled scan found new servers as advertised.

Operations Manager does not assume that all discovered machines need ActiveAgents installed on them. After a scan is completed, discovered systems are placed in a Pending Installation view in the Management Console. Installations must be approved and processed by a system operator. While this process might sound cumbersome, we found that it kept ActiveAgents from being automatically installed on the machines in our domain that didn't need them.

If you've installed a new server and want to add it to the list of managed machines before the next scheduled scan, Operations Manager makes that easy. A well-thought-out control panel lets you define scan parameters based on specific machines, domain names or wild card combinations of both. We easily added several machines to our managed list this way.

The core of Operations Manager is the Consolidator/AgentManager. The Consolidator runs on an NT 4.0 Server and handles the collection of data from the ActiveAgent software. The Consolidator passes data to the Database Access Server and takes care of event correlation, automated alerts and responses.

We noticed very little impact on overall systems performance from the agents or console, thanks in part to Mission Critical's use of compiled code instead of scripts.

Operations Manager comes configured with more than 5,000 compiled rules that provide event categorization, alerting, and automatic and manual responses. We found the alert module to be very well thought out. You can be notified by e-mail or pager, and you can define different administrators to be notified for different types of events.

Identifying a problem is only a part of the overall diagnostic procedure. Knowing how to correct the problem is at least as important. For this, Operations Manager uses ActiveKnowledge, a huge database of solutions, tips and definitions in an easy-to-understand format. We relied on the ActiveKnowledge database on several occasions when an NT error message reported by an ActiveAgent was too vague.

Installation of Operations Manager is a straightforward process, but it makes use of a large number of components from Microsoft and Mission Critical, all of which must be installed properly and in the correct sequence. We didn't encounter any major problems during the installation, but we suggest taking advantage of Mission Critical's standard offer of an onsite support engineer during installation and configuration.

Mission Critical's documentation was very impressive. We found that the online documentation was well-written, easy to understand and quick to access. The product also provides several automated response options. Using ActiveX scripting, an administrator can have an ActiveAgent trigger a script that can either stop and restart a particular NT service or shut down the entire server.

If you are responsible for more than a handful of NT Servers and are looking for a product that doesn't bog down your hardware, is easy to use and comes with excellent technical support, you can't go wrong with OnePoint Operations Manager.

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Currier is director of data communications at Duke University in Durham, N.C. Currier is also a member of the Network World Test Alliance, a cooperative of the premier reviewers in the network industry, each bringing to bear years of practical experience on every review.

Currier can be reached at robert.currier @duke.edu.

Review and buyer's guide: Network monitoring and alerting
We review several models and provide an interactive database so you can find the product that best suits your criteria. Network World, 8/23/99.