Network management systems

OpenView wins by a nose over excellent competition.

If the diversity, size and lack of control of your network remind you of the United Nations, your network might be a good candidate for a network management system. Configuring devices to work together smoothly; translating wildly different user interfaces into a common vernacular; dealing with congestion, bottlenecks and outages; and just knowing what is up and down are some of the jobs an NMS can simplify for you.

NMS products once earned a poor reputation because of their cost, bulk and awkward interfaces. They lacked the ability to comprehensively manage every facet of the devices they supported. Touted as frameworks for component-like network software tools, they were theoretical successes but practical failures. All too often, customers discarded NMS, in favor of management software bundled with devices, servers, operating systems or applications. NMS vendors had to go back to the drawing board.

We're happy to report the latest versions are responsive, easy to navigate, comprehensive and highly practical.

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If the diversity, size and lack of control of your network remind you of the United Nations, your network might be a good candidate for a network management system. Configuring devices to work together smoothly; translating wildly different user interfaces into a common vernacular; dealing with congestion, bottlenecks and outages; and just knowing what is up and down are some of the jobs an NMS can simplify for you.

NMS products once earned a poor reputation because of their cost, bulk and awkward interfaces. They lacked the ability to comprehensively manage every facet of the devices they supported. Touted as frameworks for component-like network software tools, they were theoretical successes but practical failures. All too often, customers discarded NMS, in favor of management software bundled with devices, servers, operating systems or applications. NMS vendors had to go back to the drawing board.

We're happy to report the latest versions are responsive, easy to navigate, comprehensive and highly practical.

An NMS worth its salt - and price - should manage, administer, update, monitor, report on, diagnose, troubleshoot, reset, reconfigure, audit (that is, inventory) and secure essentially your entire network. A network administrator armed with a perfect NMS shouldn't have to resort to vendor-supplied software to manage users, groups, devices or other network resources.

To find the best NMS for your network, we invited several vendors to send their products to our Connecticut lab for evaluation. Hewlett-Packard submitted 27 OpenView components, including Network Node Manager (NNM) 6.31, Performance Manager and Performance Insight 4.5, Operations 7.0, Storage Area Manager, Internet Services 4.0 and OpenView Reporter.

Computer Associates sent us UniCenter 3.0, which includes Network and Systems Management, Service Level Management, Advanced Network Operations and Performance Management.

Lucent shipped VitalSuite 8.2, consisting of VitalNet, VitalApps and VitalEvent. Concord Communications submitted eHealth 5.0, whose components are Network Health, Live Health, System Health and Application Health.

Declining to participate were IBM Tivoli and Micromuse, which said they were between product versions. Aprisma also declined.

Our results show that three of the four products scored well enough to earn World Class Award status. However, the official World Class Award goes to OpenView, for excellence in managing devices through a consistent interface. Its monitoring of network resources and reporting network activities also shined. OpenView scales well, runs on several different platforms and makes network administration much easier.

Fault and performance management

We found OpenView's core component, NNM, especially proficient at discovering the network, tracking devices, displaying graphical network maps, capturing and providing device statistics, and processing incoming SNMP alerts.