IT Monitoring Buyers Guide 2013

IT Monitoring Buyers Guide

Table of Contents
Why You Should Keep Reading 2 The Standard Introduction 3 The Discussion of Needs 3 The Listing of Use Cases 4 The Enumeration of Software Options 5

The Key Criteria 6 The Key Features 7 The Brief GroundWork Section 8 The Inevitable Table 9

Why You Should Keep Reading

If you want to cut to the chase on the ways to monitor your IT and applications, and the pluses and minuses of each approach, then keep reading... If you want to know the key trade-offs of the types of software out there, then keep reading... If you want to find out what kind of monitoring solutions have been proven to work and why, then keep reading...

2013 GroundWork, Inc. All rights reserved.

IT Monitoring Buyers Guide

The Standard Introduction

This is not your typical Buyers Guide. There are dozens of monitoring solutions (also known as tools) out there and dozens of ways to run your IT. To claim that any vendor has the absolutely-inall-situations perfect for you software borders on the insane. Lets get real. Instead, well address youthe intelligent IT buyerwithout fluff on service assurance, and IT operations efficiency. Well reserve our comments about our own product to one small section on the last page. The rest of the space here is devoted to giving you a more informed view of what the market offers, and what capabilities and features are important for different types of customers. Because theres no such thing as sucky monitoring software1. Only sucky monitoring software for your needs.

The Discussion of Needs

Which Monitoring Benefit(s) Do You Need? If youre reading this paper, theres something in your IT world that you want better insight into. Thats usually for one (or more) of 4 reasons. Each of which leads you to highlight certain things in your buying decision that your software should be able to deliver. 1. 2. 3. 4. Improve Application Performance Keep Availability High Provide Evidence of Past Service (Reporting / SLAs) Prevent Intrusions and Maintain Security

In a survey of 711 global IT managers at companies of various sizes and representing a variety of industries, nearly all or 90 percent say they do not have confidence in themselves to find problems before end users are impacted.
Source: SevOne Market Survey 2012 SevOne, 2012

So, which of these do you care about and what does that mean? If youre trying to improve performance, whats most important is measuring resource consumption patterns to find bottlenecks to eliminate. When you have the time to find bottlenecks, you can decide if processes, people, or technology can be deployed to eliminate them. This usually reveals another bottleneck right behind it, but hey, its good to be busy. Heavyweight solutions that bog down memory or CPU are also a problem, as they can impede performance. If youre trying to improve availability, whats most important is alerting and notifications. Rapid access to context around issues can help you figure out whats wrong and get the business service restored. This contextual data can help with determining the appropriate rapid response, and once service is restored, diagnosing the root cause. Notifications, Dashboards, Alerts (and Alert Suppression!), and the status view(s) of system health are very important.
1

Exception: actual sucky monitoring software. 2013 GroundWork, Inc. All rights reserved.

IT Monitoring Buyers Guide

For handling reporting and SLAs, whats most important is continual measurement of important information. An appealing way to present that information prevents snoozing too. You can also just export it out to where it is needed for other analysis and record keeping. Collecting a broad set of data is most important. If security and intrusion prevention are your key needs, then... youre in the wrong place. The software category you are probably looking for is called SIEM (Security Information and Event Management). Sometimes its the realm of IT Operations; sometimes not. In either case, you wont read about it in the rest of this paper.

60% of respondents selected application performance as an inhibitor for moving applications into the Cloud.
Source: Cisco Global Cloud Networking Survey Cisco, 2012

The Listing of Use Cases

There are hundreds of use cases for what to monitor in IT. Here are four common ones: 1. Data Center Data center monitoring is about covering all the devicesmostly servers, network, and storageand extracting relevant data from them. When things stop responding or respond slowly, theres an issue. 2. Clouds The same monitoring that you do in your data center can be done in the Cloud, with the additional benefit that you are keeping an eye on your Cloud provider. When things go down, you get the inordinate pleasure of calling them up and WTFing them in preparation for future price negotiations. File away the phrase: What, you didnt know it was down? for giggles. 3. Other Monitors You already use some tools to measure web site response times, line card fan speeds and server health. Three IDs, passwords, password strength, expirations, UIs and other general annoyances. By putting all that data into a single manager of monitors, you can relentlessly search for the background around any alert or notification. 4. Customers This is the xSP scenario, where x used to stand for Managed and increasingly, Cloud. SP is Service Provider. Here you are often monitoring a heterogeneous mix customized for each customer and the most important view is the customer overall. Looking at all the storage, or all the servers you monitor at once is useful, but not as useful as the customer view.

Currently an average of 31% of all IT applications / services are in the cloud (up from 7% in 2011). In two years time, companies would like to have around half their IT applications / services in the cloud (52%).
Source: Cisco CloudWatch Summer 2012 Cisco, 2012

2013 GroundWork, Inc. All rights reserved.

IT Monitoring Buyers Guide

The Enumeration of Software Options

What Can I Buy? Disclaimer, Disclaimer, Disclaimer: First of all, remember that your problems will be solved by a combination of Tools2, Process, and People. Many times, Process gets too little investment and Tools get too much investment. You cant sell Process (though we know a lot about it). We wont be much help on People issues, but make us an offer...

There are dozens, if not hundreds of products and opensource software that provide at least one monitoring function. Weve broadly grouped them as follows: 1. Point Tools (Fluke, NagVis, NeDi, etc.) These tools typically do one thing, but do it well. They might sniff at packets on a network link, or let you visualize network traffic. Each scratches an IT itch to see whats happening, but the rash (performance, availability, or reporting needs) usually remains. 2. Infrastructure Monitoring (Nagios, SolarWinds, Zabbix, Zenoss, etc.) These software take a category of the IT infrastructurelike Windows servers, applications, network switches, storage, etc.extract information and present it back to you in useful ways. Most of the hardware-vendor provided tools fall into this category, for example. 3. Manager of Monitors (BMC, CA, GroundWork, HP, IBM, etc.) These products take the category above and also operate to pull data from other sources. Theyre suites or platforms more than point solutions. Usually, they gather their own data and can also work with other monitors to harness the data that they collect, and provide some end-user experience capabilities. They usually monitor applications and infrastructure. See below. 4. End-User Experience / Website Monitoring (Neustar, Keynote, Gomez, etc.) is almost a separate space that focuses on the transactions that flow through IT systems instead of the systems and applications themselves. They are complementary and orthogonal to regular IT monitoring. Typically, End-User Experience focuses on either synthetic transactions (simulating complex, but real-world, interactions), geographic diversity (trying many transactions from different locations) or even load testing (trying many transactions at once). Often, this is a service that monitors the health of your eCommerce system or website.

21% of companies surveyed are operating data centers at the highest level of efficiency.
Source: Data Center Efficiency By the Numbers IBM, 2012

When someone says their software tool is a assurance solution, watch your wallet. 2013 GroundWork, Inc. All rights reserved.

IT Monitoring Buyers Guide

FAQ
Does it work with my stuff? This is pretty basicwill it (directly or indirectly) get data out of the things I want to monitor. Luckily, SNMP and other basic methods are nearly ubiquitous for at least getting some data out of your hardware. Similar methods exist for applications, such as MBeans for accessing key metrics in Java applications. Many of the open source-based software can access a large library of plugins (scripts that handle the grop of getting data from device A in format B). Whos writing this software anyway? Youve got two major optionsopen source community or everyone else (commercial companies of various flavors). The open source community is like a punching bagsturdy, but hard to move in a given direction. If you need something, youll have to do it yourself on your own timetable. Commercial companies will listen and guide their offerings to the needs of customers. You are a paid customer so you are paying to be heard in future product releases. Of course, this costs you money, but can save you time. Also, are they writing it using a programming language and database thats proven & robust? Does it scale to meet my needs? Find out about prior installations. In all fairness, some technologies do not scale as well as others, so ask about key decisions that were made for development platform, database topology, etc.

The Key Criteria

How many ways can you pull in data? Software that can pull in data in a myriad of methods is best. Theres two major axes to consider:

Integration vs. Direct Software should be able to pull in data in lots of ways, including: Direct data gathering (SNMP) Import via API Import via batch process (including annoying but functional CSV imports) Direct screen display of other softwares data Exotic methods (for example IPMI is still exotic in 2013) Web services

Agent vs. Agentless This can be a religious war in some monitoring circles. Rather than risk getting burned at the stake, just know what they are: Agents take up space on monitored devices, and yes, they have to be managed. In return, you limit network traffic dramatically. Agentless approaches dont require installing software on monitored devices, but can limit your overall scalability. Agents bundle and compress information, then send it to the master database. Agentless approaches send small bursts of information continuously.

Integration gives you freedom to use your existing processes and software tools. Most organizations like a handful of tools that they have gotten to work well. If someone is telling you they can clear out all of your other software with theirs (including us after we forget we wrote this), flee. Wave this in their face and note that single tools can risk vendor lock-in, inflexible workflows, and losing valuable skill with great tools.

As a rule of thumb, if youre monitoring devices in a single location, either approach can work for you. If anyone says that only one approach is good, raise one eyebrow skeptically and pause dramatically.

2013 GroundWork, Inc. All rights reserved.

IT Monitoring Buyers Guide

The Key Features

Thats all well and good, but there are some features that come up time and again. Lets touch on a few: How does the software indicate to a viewer that something is wrong. On the simple end you have an event console; on the more complex end you have dashboards, compressed high-data icons with multiple colors / fills and more. So something does really seem to be wrong enough that I want something to happen. Do you want a person actively notified through one or more methods? Phone, email, mobile, etc. Lots of things can go wrong in IT. Filtration prevents too many events from reaching you at the same time. If you are managing by watching a list of events go by and handling the ones in red, if 500 come at once, forget about it. Filtration hides the less important event information to let the most important ones shine through. How simple is it to schedule thingslike planned downtime and maintenance? SLAs without scheduled downtime are ugly. More is better. Data ingest is good. Data ingest, plus slapping displays from other software on a dashboard, plus API access to other software (like help desks) is better. Another War of the Roses out there in monitoring. Dynamic thresholds allow you to have thresholds that change with either usage, time or some other circumstance. It implies that there is poor performance or availability at one time that is acceptable at one time but not another. Clean tables of numbers and pretty graphs that explain how awesome you are. Very important. A little different from status screens, these are meant to give information at a glance. Multiple data formats that compress a lot of information into a little space are helpful. Ultimately, dashboards are paintings that reflect what your organization needs. Look at sample dashboards, but envision your own masterpiece from the available palette. Find out (or confirm) what you have out there on your network, without flooding your network with traffic. This includes any responsive hardware you have deployed, and could even include applications. Or you might just need a place to list everything for the next counting. Need to know when you are going to run out of space / bandwidth / CPU / memory / power / heat-generating stuff / clever server names based on an SF theme / things for people to complain about? Well, software that can give you advance warning of that by predicting consumption or modeling usage trends can give you a jump on that joyous day. There are many others, but this is a guide, not a novel.
7 2013 GroundWork, Inc. All rights reserved.

Alerts Notifications / Actions

Event Filtration

Scheduling Integration Points Dynamic thresholds

Reporting Dashboards

Discovery (or Inventory)

Prediction and Trending

IT Monitoring Buyers Guide

The Brief GroundWork Section

OK, we promised wed only talk about GroundWork for one little section, and here it is: GroundWork incorporates the best technology the open source world has to offer and combines it with real-world customer feedback to make a product. Its an affordable, updated, supported, tested, and regularly improved tool. We founded the company on the belief that fantastic software can be had without writing it from scratch, by using the best parts of the open source community. By using the wisdom of real-world usage and workflows, GroundWork adds what is needed to make a fully-functional, complete product. This product can provide powerful monitoring without the cost of entirely proprietary software or the time sink of creating or integrating your own tools.

About GroundWork
The leading open platform for network, application, and cloud monitoring, for companies with heterogeneous operating systems, application and hardware environments who want to reduce ongoing monitoring costs, consolidate views and improve staff productivity.

Contact Us
www.gwos.com 866-899-4342 info@gwos.com +1-415-992-4500 GroundWork, Inc. 201 Spear Street, Suite 1650 San Francisco, CA 94105

2013 GroundWork, Inc. All rights reserved. All other copyrights and trademarks are properties of their respective owners.

IT Monitoring Buyers Guide

The Inevitable Table

Use this handy table when evaluating vendors.

Good Stuff Company Support Services Available (incl. Training) Commitment to You Vision Product Coverage of Devices User Interface Notifications Integrations Reporting Alerts Financial Up Front Cost (Licensing) Switching Cost In Switching Cost Out Annual Cost (Maintenance or Subscription) What Does this Mean for Me? Administration Training Reporting Services

Bad Stuff

2013 GroundWork, Inc. All rights reserved.