ESM Vendors

As distributed IT infrastructures have become larger, more powerful and more

complex, the requirement to monitor and control them has increased
proportionally. A small number of major ESM framework vendors (HP, IBM,
CA and BMC) continue to dominate, but an increasing number of smaller players
have entered the marketplace, aiming to fill in the gaps not well covered by the
framework vendors, concentrate on one specific area and do that better than
vendors offering a wider overall capability, or simply to provide equivalent
functionality at much lower cost.
Agentless Monitoring
An alternative to deploying agents to every monitored system is to use an agentless
approach, with checks on status and health being performed remotely from other
computers dedicated to this task. Typically, agentless monitoring is carried out
using generic means of accessing the monitored computers provided by the
manufacturers. The advantage of the agentless approach is that no additional
software has to be deployed to the monitored systems; typically, a user account and
password are created for the monitoring systems to periodically log on to the
monitored system and perform the desired checks; any detected anomalies result in
an alert being raised and sent to the relevant support personnel in the same manner
as for agent-based monitoring described above.
The main disadvantages of agentless monitoring are that it can result in higher
levels of network traffic between monitored systems and the management server,
generally making it less suitable for use over slow-speed network links.
Additionally, if contact is lost between the management server and the monitored
system, no monitoring can be performed (agent based monitoring solutions
invariably support alert buffering at the agent with store and forward capability
allowing alerts to be sent to the management server once contact is re-established).
The main advantage of agentless monitoring is that it is generally easier to deploy
and maintain as no additional software needs to be deployed to monitored systems
and all monitoring configurations are held on the management server. Agentless
monitoring also lends itself well to situations when it is desirable to test availability
of a service remotely (e.g. a website or email relay server) as this is reflective of
how the service is accessed by users.

Network Monitoring
As mentioned earlier, the technologies and techniques used in ESM originated in
the Network arena, and continue to be used in pretty much the same way up to the
present day. As well as monitoring network devices (hubs, switches, routers,
remote access servers and so on) for faults and performance statistics, network
monitoring solutions also map the network topology and connectivity (logical &
physical) between devices. This connectivity information is vitally important
detecting, troubleshooting and resolving network problems. Perhaps the most
widely-used application for network device, topology and connectivity monitoring
is HP OpenView Network Node Manager (NNM).
A further key function is to manage the configurations of network devices.
Network device configurations take the form of instruction sets stored on the hard
disk or in flash memory on the device, and can be manually amended via a remote
login, or uploaded via FTP (file transfer protocol). In any large network, it is not
feasible to manually maintain configurations on all devices individually; it is
preferable to store, maintain and update configurations on a central computer and
distribute these out to devices on the network as required. Where configuration
updates have to be distributed to a number of devices, it may be desirable to
schedule these automatically and perform them overnight or at weekends to
minimise disruption. If any problems with new configurations are encountered, the
ability to roll back to a previous configuration which was known to work
properly is also valuable.
CiscoWorks is a network device configurations manager used in many sites using
Cisco network kit.