I work with an LSP and we're currently looking for a system that will have all the features of Network as well as Network Asset Management, irrespective of different geographical locations.
I would really appreciate your help and suggestions regarding products available for this.
As with all the previous posters it is hard to pin point the specifics and also would be great to know what business outcome you are trying achieve.
A couple of solutions you might want to consider.
1. BMC's ADDM solution discovers the infrastructure, network, switches, servers, and how its all connected and the dependancies, You can then push this across into a CMDB and have a proper Asset Management system do its stuff. Link to BMC Software ADDM bit.ly
2. Entuity is another solution that might fit the bill depending on the outcome you are after. Seen this in numerous companies where SolarWinds falls short. Worth a look at both. Link to Entuity is here bit.ly
Good Luck
R
Disclosure: The company I work for is partners with several vendors including BMC
Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
In my opinion, the question that has been raised by Randy (What is an LSP?) should not have an impact on the selection of a Network and Asset Management System, as like in other companies only H/W, S/W and peripheral devices are part of the Network.
So, we're in need of a system that can cater our Network and Asset related activities from a centralized location covering all geographical locations.
I hope the requirement is more clear now. Kindly correct me, if I am wrong somewhere.
I would appreciate your expert guidance here.
Looking forward to hearing from you.
Feel free to contact me, in case you feel a conversation will help in resolving my query.
Recommending the "best" system for an application like this does require a great deal of knowledge about the assets as well as the enterprise they belong to. An outside expert can make recommendations, but they may not be in complete alignment with your needs.
In the past I worked in a service provider environment where the bill rate was tied to the inventory of assets being managed. And our customer wanted to pay based on an asset count that was live, and easy to audit. To meet this need I used the system Zabbix. Zabbix was much more than simply a tool to ping all of the networked assets, it allowed network and server health monitoring, and over time many IT automation projects were built within the Zabbix user interface, allowing one management console to cover multiple needs. And Zabbix provided a reporting system allowing us to produce reports covering our SLA's as well as reporting on managed assets.
Solar Winds Orion is another strong performer I have used, but I didn't find Solar Winds to be as easy to customize or to add-on to. Solar Winds is better used as what it is intended to do, and the set-up is much quicker than Zabbix out of the box. But Zabbix is more powerful and extensible. However Solar Winds is costly enough to prevent getting it through a budget meeting. I've had more Solar Winds initiatives fail than succeed, and price was 100% of the reason for failure each time.
Zabbix is reasonably priced, and for the budget constrained it can be had as a free open source option if you can't budget for paid support. Zabbix also requires less hardware to manage a larger network, so it is easier on the machine resources than Solar Winds.
'Best' is a slippery concept. I'm not familiar with LSP work (which is critical), and without knowing your size, scope and needs any definitive statement is going to be a guess. Best I can do is note that anytime you use an 'all in one' product there are more compromises with functionality. Best to determine what your criteria are before making a decision, and lab testing it with the people who will be using it.
That being said Solar Winds Orion is an extensible monitoring platform that includes an asset management component. The core product you are interested in is NPM, Network Performance Management which has some asset management capabilities, but you'll want to consider their asset management component which includes a help desk ticketing system. I am afraid I don't have direct experience with the asset manager, but if the other products I have used for some years (NPM and APM) are any indication this will be fairly complete.
At the very least the company is supportive of evaluation, and you can download and try some or all of their products, no charge for 30 days. I suggest downloading NPM (at www.solarwinds.com ) and the asset manager (at www.solarwinds.com ) and testing. The product will begin the 30 day countdown immediately, and one huge advantage is if you chose to monitor part or all of your environment during evaluation and like the product a license key is all that's needed to activate the product beyond the 30 day eval.
Keep in mind that the product is licensed per year, so there will be recurring costs - but this is largely offset by continuing improvements that make that cost worthwhile. One other thing to consider is the need for Microsoft SQL server. the limited (free) product is included but it does limit history retention. A separate SQL server is recommended for adequate performance, and keep in mind standard SQL tuning requirements for memory and disk channel.