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Independent Evaluations of Networking Products and Tools |
NETWORK TESTING LABS REVIEW:Which Costs Less to Deploy and Use?TCO Study: Argent Extended Technologies vs. Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) 2007
Executive Summary
Argent Extended Technologies costs a great deal less than Microsoft SCOM when you stop to consider what you spend in deployment, administrative and troubleshooting expenses. Extended Technologies is not only the better network monitoring and management product, it actually saves your company real money because it yields more benefits yet takes less effort, in both time and expertise, to install and use. Extended Technologies has, by far, the lower Total Cost of Ownership.
Discussion
A hammer costs a lot less than a nail gun. A handsaw is cheaper than a power saw. And sighting by eye is much less expensive than using a high-tech laser-based straightedge. You know intuitively, however, that building a house would be prohibitively expensive and time-consuming if a builder used only hand tools to get the job done. The IT dollars you spend to keep your network up and running directly affect your company’s profits. A network monitoring and management tool that costs less to deploy and use translates directly into a bigger and healthier bottom line. The primary network monitoring and management expenses consist of what you spend on administration, what you spend on deployment and what you spend on troubleshooting network problems. A monitoring and management product that substantially reduces these expenses – and which of course accurately, correctly and responsively monitors your particular network components – is a clear winner when it comes to saving employee costs and dramatically increasing productivity. Moreover, a tool that helps you find and resolve network problems more quickly is worth its weight in gold because it keeps the network available, up and running. Setting aside license fees for a moment, what are the real costs of using and setting up a network monitoring and management product? To determine these costs and find out which network monitoring and management product you should be using, we tested two market leaders in our Alabama lab and at various customer sites. We looked at Argent Software’s Extended Technologies and Microsoft Corporation’s System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) 2007. Argent Extended Technologies, we found, costs far less than Microsoft SCOM to operate and even to install. Extended Technologies emerged the clear winner in our tests, and Extended Technologies earns the Network Testing Labs World Class award for Best Monitoring and Management Product.
Administration and TroubleshootingIn day-to-day use, Extended Technologies costs far less than SCOM. We incurred lower Extended Technologies costs in every facet of operations, as shown in the following table:
Table 1. Operational cost differences
Network administrators spent an average of 35% more time accomplishing typical tasks with SCOM than with Extended Technologies. For example, while both Extended Technologies and SCOM notified us with alacrity about the performance problems, device failures and network outages we created in the lab, Extended Technologies did a better and more productive job of escalating alerts, via e-mail and pager, when first-responders were slow to acknowledge the alerts. Extended Technologies also interfaces with Remedy Help Desk software in order to automatically issue trouble tickets for tracking problems and their resolutions. We also found that the out-of-the box Extended Technologies alert thresholds much more closely matched the needs of our network. Extended Technologies’ corrective action (remediation) feature is more powerful and capable than SCOM’s. For instance, Extended Technologies can automatically issue SQL statements (to trigger, perhaps, the running of an Oracle process). SCOM cannot do this. Using Extended Technologies is much more intuitive than using SCOM. Extended Technologies graphically depicts the network to give you an at-a-glance understanding of a network problem. We found Extended Technologies’ user interface helped network troubleshooters find and fix problems much faster than did SCOM’s. Moreover, the Extended Technologies on-screen dashboard is completely customizable.
DeploymentWe decided to install the agent-based configurations of Argent’s and Microsoft’s products, both to maximize the quality of monitoring data and minimize the network traffic associated with each monitored site. We tested three deployment efforts. The first deployment effort installed each monitoring product across the entire 6,500-node network, while the second effort simulated the acquisition of a small company by adding 100 nodes at a single remote site to the overall monitoring environment. The third deployment simulated the acquisition of a somewhat larger company by adding four remote sites to the monitoring environment. The four sites had a total of 250 computers – 150 at one site, 50 at a second site, and 25 each at a third site and a fourth site. Table 2 shows the person-time and associated expenses we incurred installing each of the two products across the entire network. You can see that the Argent installation cost $7,800 less – a significant difference.
Table 2. Network-wide deployment effort (6,500 nodes)
Note that even the planning task took longer with Microsoft’s product than with Argent’s. We found that Microsoft lacks a single unified architecture/planning document for SCOM, while Argent supplies a cohesive and cogent single document for planning purposes. Table 2 reflects person time, not elapsed time. In actual calendar days, we got Extended Technologies up and running two weeks before SCOM. For our expense calculations, we used an average network administrator salary of $78,000 per year. Adding the costs of benefits and other indirect – but real – expenditures gave us an employee cost amount of $150,000 per person per year ($3,000 per week). You should adjust these figures upward or downward if your personnel expenses for network administrators, network troubleshooters and network engineers is higher or lower. For the Argent installation, we used the following components. Argent Console main engine SQL Server database (we could have used Oracle, if we wished) Argent Console backup engine Argent Console executor Mother and daughter engines Specific monitors for each site’s particular mix of servers– database, e-mail, file, Web and application (Argent Data Consolidator, Argent Exchange Monitor, Argent Guardian, Argent Monitor for Oracle, Argent Sentry, Argent SNMP Monitor, Argent SQL Server Monitor, and Argent WMI Monitor)
For the SCOM installation, we used the following components. Operational Database server (absolutely required to run on a Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 1 server) Root Management server, for central coordination of monitoring processes Management servers, which forward agent-transmitted data to the Operational Database component Gateway servers, which act as proxies between Management servers and a set of agents Audit Collection servers, which log security events in the audit collection database Data Warehouse and Reporting server, which helps SCOM produce its reports
Table 3 shows the effort required to deploy each vendor’s monitoring product to a single remote site. This deployment, which added 100 nodes to the monitoring environment, cost more than twice as much with SCOM.
Table 3. Remote site deployment effort (100 nodes)
Table 3 clearly demonstrates that, as your organization grows and you need to deploy additional network monitoring and management, Extended Technologies will continue to keep IT staffing costs to a minimum. As we installed Extended Technologies across our large test network, its greater scalability became a key factor in helping us reduce costs and increase productivity. Argent Extended Technologies has a pure three-tier architecture that SCOM lacks. While the SCOM SQL Server database (which requires a Microsoft SQL Server license) can reside on a separate server from SCOM’s central analysis and reporting modules, the result is still essentially a two-tier approach. Table 4 details the deployment effort we experienced when we added four remote sites to the monitoring environment. The four sites had a total of 250 computers – 150 at one site, 50 at a second site, and 25 each at a third site and a fourth site. Again, the Extended Technologies deployment cost less than half that of SCOM.
Table 4. Deployment effort for four sites (250 nodes)
Table 4, like Table 3, clearly shows Extended Technologies’ deployment advantages over SCOM. Not only do you spend less money on Extended Technologies, you get it up and running more quickly. Setting useful and practical alert thresholds consumed three more person-days with SCOM than with Extended Technologies. Note that the three-day delay in getting SCOM up and running caused us to incur costs far beyond just the three days of person-time – until properly configured, SCOM left our network unmonitored.
The icing on the cake was that Extended Technologies used network bandwidth much more frugally than SCOM. Furthermore, Extended Technologies can run on a wider variety of platforms, and it can use either SQL Server or Oracle – your preference. SCOM requires Windows Server 2003, and the SCOM relational database, without exception, must be SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 1. Extended Technologies is easily the more scalable, robust and reliable of the two products.
ConclusionExtended Technologies proved to be more accurate and more capable than SCOM, yet it costs far less to deploy and use. Additionally, Extended Technologies is more scalable, more reliable and easier to use. We strongly recommend you take a close look at how Extended Technologies can save significant time and money in your organization.
Test bed and methodologyWe deployed each monitoring and management product on an enterprise network containing approximately 6,500 computers at eleven geographically-dispersed sites. The file, Web, database, e-mail and application servers at these eleven sites ran on a mix of different Windows versions as well as Linux. After the initial deployment, we simulated the acquisition of two companies by first deploying the monitoring and management products at a single remote site with 100 computers and then deploying the products across four remote sites with a total of 250 computers – 150 at one site, 50 at a second site, and 25 each at a third site and a fourth site. We evaluated each monitoring and management product's ability to discover, manage, administer, monitor, alert, report on, troubleshoot and automatically fix network performance problems, bottlenecks, device errors and outages. Virtually all our testing took place across WAN links. We produced reports to show device and computer status information, inventory results, network usage trends, availability and uptime information, network baseline information and graphical maps of the network.
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