Imperfect Diagnosis

David Essex   Today’s Top Stories   or  Other Outsourcing Stories  

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July 2, 2001 (Computerworld) -- Kevin Book, senior director of technology at The Motley Fool Inc., can easily recall the days before he had adequate tools to monitor his company's popular financial Web site, which attracts more than 2 million visitors per month. "Our online store actually ran out of disk [space]," he says. "We were unable to write orders. You can imagine what the guys in ties were thinking when that happened."

Like many IT managers today, Book is charged with keeping a Web infrastructure up and humming. He relies on an assortment of products for snapshots that, taken together, form a more or less complete picture. Some, like the Tivoli Enterprise Console from Tivoli Systems Inc. in Austin, Texas, provide trouble alerts and event logs. Others, such as Patrol 2000 from BMC Software Inc. in Houston, monitor major elements such as servers, applications and databases. Additional tools, including SiteScope from Freshwater Software Inc. in Boulder, Colo., and the Web-based performance services from Keynote Systems Inc. in San Mateo, Calif., specifically test page downloads and other Web transactions and compare them to industry benchmarks.

Software Tools Fenway Starts at $15,000 to $30,000 Dirig Software Inc. Nashua, N.H. www.dirig.com HP OpenView Starts at $23,900 for Operations console, $230 per node Hewlett-Packard Co. www.hp.com Patrol Separate Predict and Perform versions for Oracle ($290 and $390 per server, respectively) and Unix ($395 and $875); Storage Resource Manager (starts at $40,000); Service Level Management (starts at $5,000 plus $195 per managed node; Windows versions start at $815) Site Angel Starts at $900 per year BMC Software Inc. Houston www.bmc.com Peakstone eAssurance $48,000 plus $4,800 annually per Web server CPU Peakstone Corp. Sunnyvale, Calif. www.peakstone.com Silk Performer Starts at $25,000 Silk Test Starts at $6,500 Segue Software Inc. Lexington, Mass. www.segue.com SiteScope $995 for 25 monitors Freshwater Software Inc. Boulder, Colo. www.freshwatersoftware.com Tivoli Enterprise Console Approximately $300 per node Tivoli Systems Inc. Austin, Texas www.tivoli.com Unicenter TNG Starts at $2,500 Computer Associates International Inc. Islandia, N.Y. www.ca.com — David Essex

Jeb Bolding, a senior analyst at Enterprise Management Associates Inc. (EMA) in Boulder, Colo., agrees with that assessment. "It's still difficult to get a complete, end-to-end view," he says. "They all say they've got one, and no one really does."

Book's multitiered, piecemeal approach is common. Mainstream systems—management frameworks such as Tivoli, HP OpenView from Hewlett Packard Co. and Unicenter TNG from Computer Associates International Inc. in Islandia, N.Y.—often serve as both underpinning and umbrella, allowing network managers to keep an eye on all their hardware and applications, of which their Web systems are a subset.

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