Comparison Paper

Argent vs. Nimsoft

Contents

Overview 2
Critical Differences 3
Investment Differences 5
n-Tier Architecture 7
Critical Support Differences 8
Installation And Implementation Differences 9

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Overview

This document compares and contrasts the network availability and performance monitoring capabilities in
the Argent monitoring products with the Nimsoft product.

Both products lay emphasis on ease of use and speedy deployment, at the same time offering advanced
tools to monitor the complete IT infrastructure. Yet, as this report shows, there are many significant
differences between the products – architectural differences as well as implementation differences, and
most importantly differences in pricing policies and the way technical support is handled by the two
companies.

We will try to point out the major differences between these two products in a number of critical areas, in
the following sections.

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Critical Differences

The following table contains 37 critical production-monitoring requirements. The Argent monitoring products
support all these critical requirements.

Feature Server/Application Supported Argent Nimsoft

Windows NT Operating 1. Windows 200x (including Windows 2008) Yes Yes
Systems

2. Microsoft Cluster Service Yes Yes

3. Microsoft Terminal Server Yes Yes

Messaging Services 4. Microsoft Exchange Yes Yes

5. Microsoft Exchange 2007 Yes No

6. Lotus Notes Yes Yes

7. Lotus Domino Yes Yes

Internet/Web Facilities 8. Full FTP Site Monitoring Yes No

9. Real Email Turnaround Time Yes Yes

10. Hacker Attacks on an Internet or Intranet Yes No

11. Page Changes on an Intranet or Web Site Yes No

12. Response Time Alerting for Slow Intranet Sites Yes Yes

Capacity Planning and 13. GUI and web trend reporting tool Yes Yes
Trend Analysis

14. Custom Web Report Facility Yes Yes

15. Report Viewable via a Web Browser Yes Yes

16. SLA Reports Emailed to Managers Yes Yes

Linux Support 17. Ability to Monitor Linux Yes Yes

Flexible Design 18. Option to Install Local OR remote Agents Yes Limited

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Critical Differences

Feature Server/Application Supported Argent Nimsoft

SuperConsole 19. Ability to see all Outstanding Alerts for All Yes Yes
Monitored Regions on One Screen

n-Tier Architecture 20. Ability to Divide Monitoring by Region, or Yes No

Function, or Server Type, etc.

Essential Usability 21. Ability to Escalate Alerts Yes Limited

Features

22. RunBooks Yes No

23. Console Comment Field Yes No

24. Three Levels of Alert Importance Yes Yes

25. Memo Field for Groupware Support Yes No

26. Ability to Fire Multiple Alerts from a Relator Yes No

27. Drag and Drop Support in Relators Yes No

28. Master List of All Objects Yes No

29. Ability to Import and Export Rule Sets Yes Limited

Technical Support 30. Live Support on Weekends Yes Extra Cost

31. Live Support on Holidays Yes Extra Cost

32. Live Support Outside Working Hours Yes Extra Cost

Network Monitoring 33. Hubs and Routers Monitored at No Extra Cost Yes Yes
Included

SNMP Support 34. Complete SNMP Support at No Extra Cost Yes Yes

35. Can Put SNMP Alerts on the Master Console Yes Yes

36. Optimized Long-Walk Capabilities Yes No

37. SNMP Macro Facility Yes No

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Investment Differences

Argent and Nimsoft products both provide comprehensive IT performance and availability monitoring
solutions. Their cost-effective and user-friendly solutions offer tremendous functionality and both are
proving to be credible alternatives to the Big 4 in network monitoring solutions.

Nevertheless, there are crucial differences when it comes to the kind of investment one has to make while
implementing each product. Here is a table illustrating the differences in investment one has to make for
each product.

Feature Argent Nimsoft

1. Unlimited Number of Management Consoles Included Included

2. Interface to Remedy Included Included

3. Interface to Tivoli Included No

4. Interface to UniCenter Included No

5. Monitoring Citrix Included Included

6. Monitoring Terminal Server Included Included

7. Monitoring Lotus Domino Included Included

8. Monitoring Lotus Notes Included Included

9. Monitoring Microsoft IIS Included Included

10. Monitoring Proxy Server Included No

11. Monitoring Cisco Included Included

12. Monitoring NetWare Included Included

13. Interfacing to Insight Manager Included No

14. Interfacing to Dell Open Manage Included No

15. Interfacing to IBM Netfinity Included No

16. Automatic Report Distribution Included Included

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Investment Differences

Feature Argent Nimsoft

17. Automatic Report Distribution Included Included

18. Universal Browser Interface Included Included

19. Service Level Agreement Included Included

20. SNMP Support Included Included

We now turn our attention towards the major architectural differences between the Argent Suite of
Monitoring Products and Nimsoft Products.

Area The Argent Monitoring Products Nimsoft Monitoring Products

Remote Monitoring Agents* Yes, fully supported No, Limited Support

SuperConsole Yes Yes

n-tier Architecture Yes No

Scalable** Yes Yes

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n-Tier Architecture

With Argent's n-tier architecture, customers can have all monitored servers in a single monitoring region, or
optionally, customers can divide monitored servers into different regions by geography, function, etc.

Typically for small environments (under 50 monitored servers), a single monitoring region will be appropriate.

However, take the case of a large South-West utility that uses Argent to monitor over 1,200 production
servers. Argent engineers worked with this company's technical staff to design a monitoring topology
whereby monitoring was done by server function, each of the following has its own monitoring region:

• All the SQL Server production servers in a one monitoring region

• All the SQL Server test servers in a different monitoring region
• All the Exchange 2007 servers in a different monitoring region
• All the IIS servers in a different monitoring region
• All the Power Gen production servers in a different monitoring region

Best of all, all outstanding alerts from all these monitoring regions are displayed on one screen —the Argent
Super Console.

Other customers create independent monitoring regions based on geographic region, such as East, Central,
West, South, Canada, etc.

Only Argent has an n-tier architecture and the Super Console.

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Critical Support Differences

With both Argent and Nimsoft products monitoring and reporting on systems and services that run 24 hours
a day, 365 days a year, it is crucial that they also be provided with technical support 24x7, all year through.

However, Argent is the only product that provides round the clock technical support including on holidays
and weekends.

In contrast, Nimsoft only offers free online support for all users of Nimsoft products. Customers need to go in
for paid support that provides them with access to the Technical Support staff at Nimsoft.

Even in paid support one has to choose between different options. Nimsoft provides various response
options that include 5x8, 7x12 and 24x7 support and the customer can choose an option that best suits
them.

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Installation And Implementation Differences

While many network monitoring products typically take days to install, implement and integrate various
components, both Argent and Nimsoft make it a lot simpler to install their products. However, installing the
Nimsoft product and getting it up and running successfully still takes a few weeks at best.

Installing Argent, on the other hand, requires barely 10 minutes.

Enterprise Service Management Systems: Functional Categories

Service management software functions can be grouped into several categories based on the specific
service enhancements and solutions that they provide to a business organization, including:

1. Business service management

2. Event management
3. Network management
4. Systems and applications management
5. Performance management
6. Security information and event management.

The document provides a comparison of the enterprise service management solutions offered by Argent and
Nimsoft.

Business Service Management

Businesses know that customer satisfaction depends a great deal on their business services functioning
smoothly and without interruptions.

Access to Argent’s product suite can be done using the traditional GUI, where all management is done via
simple point-and-click. For remote administrators, a thin-client GUI can be installed.

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Installation And Implementation Differences

Argent is also a strong believer in the future of the Web. Argent provides the Argent Business Manager as a
web-enabled solution that has the capability to monitor all networks and databases and identify, report, and
safeguard against outages of business-critical applications and devices across the entire IT infrastructure of
the business. Argent Ninja is a similar product, specifically designed for Help Desks where only incident
management and Alert Escalation is important – all critical definitions, control of services and monitoring
tasks are removed to provide a safe and secure web-based platform to manage Alerts.

Argent Commander is another Web 2.0 product that takes the simplicity of monitoring to the next level.
Customers can drill down from an Enterprise Overview into specific servers to see the real-time data on key
performance indicators such as CPU, disk space and network traffic, and hardware details of the device. You
can also get Top X Reports on the most overloaded servers, servers with least disk space, and more.

Nimsoft, on the other hand, has the BSM Express, where companies can manage the availability and
performance of the underlying IT infrastructure—including all servers, routers, applications, and other
systems—based on the performance of their services. The Nimsoft Enterprise Console is the key operations
interface for administrators, offering robust capabilities for event handling, automation, remediation, and
much more. SDP functions as a complementary extension of the Enterprise Console, offering administrators
an easy way to facilitate ongoing, on-demand, and real-time information sharing with business
customers. In addition, if desired, administrators can leverage SDP’s basic administration capabilities, such
as event handling, to enable business customers and IT staff to collaboratively engage in troubleshooting
and remediation.

However, Nimsoft lacks a web-enabled management console. Nimsoft’s web-interface is designed

for output (dashboards, reports and alarms) only, management of the product, such as threshold
adjustment, and is only available via a Windows based thick-client GUI.

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Installation And Implementation Differences

Event Management
The processes of event management include automatic collection, consolidation and correlation of events.
Argent software offers a comprehensive platform and an independent end-to-end solution for event
correlation and analysis.

First of all, configuration of maintenance periods is very easy with Argent – a server can be put into
maintenance mode simply by responding to an alert even on a Blackberry. It is generally highly cumbersome
and time-consuming to configure maintenance periods and general scheduling operations within Nimsoft.

Network Management
Network management helps improve the availability of critical business services by rapidly identifying
problems and resolving network-related events. In this area, Argent offers two products: the Argent SNMP
Monitor and the Argent WMI Monitor.

The Argent SNMP Monitor offers services pertaining to the monitoring and reporting of SNMP network
devices. The Argent WMI Monitor offers monitoring services over the Windows platform using WMI scripts.
Argent software also offers other compatible optimization tools to complement these products.

Nimsoft Monitoring Solutions consists of probes and gateways that provide access to the device status. All
probes have their own GUI that allows the user to facilitate system activities. Nimsoft is unable to import
and compile MIB’s, adding new OID’s/MIB’s to Nimsoft involves running MIB’s through a user built Perl
script which has a high rate of failure - additionally, the script is for SNMP v2 Traps only, users must find
OID's or use a third-party MIB compiler to add them for SNMP Get Rules.

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Installation And Implementation Differences

Systems and Applications Management

Systems and applications management optimizes the health and availability of critical business services by
providing rapid problem identification and resolution for these resources.

Argent Guardian is system management software that enhances the reliability and performance of an
enterprise’s Windows 200x, NT, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, and Linux servers. It uses a patented agent-optional
architecture. It proactively identifies and corrects issues even before the end-users come to know that
issues exist. For identifying issues, it makes use of pre-defined Rule Sets, which contain over 2,500 Rules
and pre-defined reports enabling customers to maximize the reliability of production servers and
applications.

You can view the console using both a traditional GUI interface, as well as a Web-based interface.

It is an extremely scalable and monitoring and alerting solution. You need to install it on one server only from
which it will start monitoring all servers. It decreases the total cost of ownership. You can easily categorize
servers into groups along business lines, geographic locations, or server types. After creating the groups,
you can view all outstanding alerts from all groups worldwide on a central console as well as issue alerts
when problems arise. Argent Guardian is the all-in-one solution for monitoring servers.

Nimsoft only monitors server availability via pings. Configuring alarms, such as email and SMS notifications,
are extremely cumbersome. In addition, setting up escalations is completely unintuitive. Nimsoft pitches its
product as an agent-optional solution, however it’s predominately an agent-based product, many features
supported by ArgentXT such as (agentless) service restarts and other similar actions are not available with
Nimsoft. While Nimsoft is primarily an agent-based solution; pushing out its agents and its hubs (a hub is
similar to a Monitoring Engine) is a manual process, users are unable to remotely push out the agents/hubs
making deployment of their product a very slow process.

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Installation And Implementation Differences

Performance Management
Argent records its data to a true relational database, easily allowing for third-party software reporting.
Argent can also have automatic report distribution. Argent Guardian allows users to set up their preferences
with a simple point and click interface or import existing scripts, providing a flexible and intuitive solution.
Nimsoft does not write its metrics to a relational database.

The database system used by Nimsoft is extremely cumbersome, especially for third-party reporting writing
applications. Nimsoft uses a proprietary monitoring report writer to output its reports, additionally, reports
are only offered via graphs, tabular reports, summary type reports are not an option; historical graphs only.
Creating dependencies within Nimsoft isn’t effortless; users must be versed in scripting to setup
dependencies.

Security Information and Event Management

Argent Guardian provides reporting flexibility for its users through a variety of options, including
alphanumeric paging, email, and SMS. Argent Console can send alarms and alerts in any language, from
PERL to Visual Basic to C++.

Argent’s Extended Technologies can act on these alerts by running a program, running a script, restarting a
failed Windows background service or rebooting a server, and can also issue SQL statements. In addition to
issuing security alerts, Argent Guardian provides a full audit trail for compliance with regulatory
requirements, including Sarbanes-Oxley.

Nimsoft is only capable of alarming users for event log/general log, specific events. Unlike the Argent Data
Consolidator, Nimsoft discards all events and is unable in offering its products for compliance purposes.

Note: Product names and other trademarks referred to in this comparison paper are the property of their respective trademark
holders. ArgSoft Intellectual Property Holdings Limited created this Comparison Paper for informational purposes only. ArgSoft
makes no warranty, either express or implied, in this document. The information contained in this document is subject to change
without notice. ArgSoft shall not be liable for any technical or editorial errors, or omissions contained in this document, nor for
incidental, indirect or consequential damages resulting from the furnishing, performance, or use of the material contained in this
document, or the document itself.
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