Monitoring for small and medium-sized companies compared

UnderSurveillance

Article from ADMIN 07/2012

By Jens-Christoph Brendel

Monitoring is similar to backup: It is not a question of whether or not to monitor, but how. The solution to this problem is to have a good strategy with the right priorities and the right tools.

The thing about any kind of tabular software comparison in the field of monitoring and elsewhere is that all of the more-or-less mature solutions support the most important features. It's unthinkable to compare every single feature, but if you just look at the critical features, there will be virtually no differences. A check mark would appear in 97 percent of the lines in the table. Leaving these results as is would be misleading; you might think that Icinga was basically the same as Tivoli on paper, for example – although the two programs use totally different approaches.

To find a solution to this dilemma, you have to leave the safety of simple tables with Yes/No boxes and run the risk of losing track. That is why this article attempts to find a compromise: We did a survey, but we asked for descriptive responses in free text format – some of which we decided to publish in unabbreviated form.

Additionally, we have tried to avoid comparing apples and oranges. For example, Tivoli, which is IBM's integrated solution for system and service management includes monitoring functions, among other things. The more modules you need from the Tivoli portfolio – such as asset, storage, security and agreement management, stock management, procurement, work management – the greater the potential benefit of integrating all of these areas under a single umbrella. On the other hand, if you compare the relatively limited subset of monitoring options with a product that exclusively offers similar features in just this one area, Tivoli's integration benefits disappear, and you are left with a construction that is both too complex and too expensive, and always two sizes too big. Thus, we ignored software of this caliber here.

We would have loved to cover some other products but were foiled by the vendor's lack of interest. For example, the German office of Quest Software, the manufacturer of Big Brother, purportedly forwarded our questionnaire to the

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