* The last word on readers’ picks for management tools
This last article in my Readers’ Choice series contains readers’ recommendations for their favorite tools in a variety of categories. This captures all of the recommendations I haven’t reported yet and some latecomers.
Aruba by Valencia Systems was recommended by two readers. One suggested Aruba for historical performance reporting, capacity planning and trend analysis, and the other suggested Aruba for service-level management. Says one:
“The WAN reports have proved invaluable. It has been extremely stable (runs on an Oracle backend). Just as the Valencia reps said, it truly was easy to install and configure, (unlike many of the other products I’ve used), yet powerful in flexibility and depth. The new server reports are great as well. Great response from tech support.”
The other writes:
“We have it set to monitor everything from availability to throughput and also server hard drive space. And their willingness to take requests/suggestions on product features is very much appreciated and pretty much above par. My only lament is that their tech-support function needs some attention from executives… While they are obviously very good at their jobs, I think they need to invest more in tech support.”
Dartware’s Intermapper was recommended by a reader for its real-time reporting capabilities. The reader uses it for monitoring 500 WAN circuits, with all results displayed on one screen:
“This is extremely valuable. With just a glance we have a very comprehensive view of the health of the entire enterprise’s WAN. Any circuit with errors, high utilization or downtime is highlighted by changing color or symbol. Although we use [HP’s Network Node Manager] and SNMPc, none of the other products can give us this much information this quickly on current WAN health on a one-screen view. Also great tech support.”
Another reader with a need for high availability and fast applications in an online environment recommends Panorama from Altaworks.
He selected Panorama for its ability “to time-synchronize alarms and events across servers and to monitor application performance in production… Prior to the Panorama implementation, we didn’t really have significant monitoring capabilities that could pinpoint what went wrong down to a specific time across different servers. Following the implementation, we had our best revenue month due to the fact that the Web site performed flawlessly. Any business looking to improve quality for end users as well as to make their IT process more efficient should consider Altaworks Panorama as a performance-management product.”
Finally, one user recommended Lotus Notes because it “is still a versatile and flexible tool for our needs for distributing assignments, coordinating across differing platforms and maintaining schedules… We were apprehensive when IBM acquired Lotus; but so far, they seemed to have taken a hands-off approach on the Lotus software (at least, from our perspective).”
Many thanks to all our readers who contributed their recommendations. It’s my hope that some of these recommendations may help other readers find needed management tools.
