This is far from a competitive analysis and more of an opinion, but I think it rings pretty true.
When we ran Tivoli (pre Solarwinds days), the code base was very similar to that used by HP Openview.
I believe that HP ported Openview onto the AIX platform for IBM at the Openview 3.x code level. I'm not sure just how much development IBM has done since this original port was completed.
Tivoli (and Openview) are good products, however they are far more complex and IMO require dedicated support teams in order to keep them maintained and running. You would need to be a major shop in order to justify not only the initial expense (software and hardware), but also the ongoing support costs.
We had major problems keeping our Tivoli platform maintained - and was one of the reasons for selecting Orion as the replacement. Orion does pretty much all we require, and is maintained from within the Network Support team.
Usability is also a very big factor - there would be a mutiny in our shop should we propose moving back to either Tivoli or Openview,
Dave.
I have a similar problem as yours Bryan.
Our company is a service provider to many customers and uses expensive and complex tools like Concorde Nethealth to monitor these networks.
I only support the internal "IT" network and as such use Orion as a dashboard to monitor the Core of our relatively "small" network (over 100K nodes).
However, we have been mandated to use the same tools used to monitor the customer network, which is supported by a totally different group.
This has not worked well in the past, as it's difficult to get support from this group, as we are not classified as an external customer.
They are currently replacing Concorde with IBM's Proviso monitoring tool, but from what I have seen of it so far, Orion beats it hands down as far as an operational dashboard goes.
I would fight to maintain Orion, at least as a network monitoring dashboard tool.
I have not seen any other tools that come close to the ease of setup and use of Orion, or being able to see the health of your whole network at a glance.
I think for internal IT and the glass candy interfaces you'd be better served with Orion but , if you are a service provider Orion is not going to scale to meet the reqs of that side of the business. Proviso (now TNPM) is sooo smartly architected to handle massive amounts of data. It may not be as nimble to screw around with for IT but for your revenue generating network, Proviso rules and thank God IBM is finally investing more in to it.
KM
Orion is great for companies that are Midsized and smaller. It's not design to run on 1 server supporting 200,000 interfaces. Tiovali and HP OpenView NNM 7.53 running on Linux/Solaris has a problem supporting 200,000 interfaces on 1 server. But it can support it and scale further than Orion. Tiovali and OpenView are for companies supporting 3000 nodes and 300,000 interfaces and larger. We tried running Tiovali and the server took a dump after 150,000 nodes. Our HP OpenView server is supporting 253,000 nodes on a low end Solaris server.
I believe you are talking about Netview which leveraged the Openview code base and is a defunct Tivoli/IBM product. In fact, it was legacy IBM and absorbed in to Tivoli. That only did basic network management (SNMP, topology views etc)
Tivoli was smart enough to buy Micromuse which had Precision which eventually became ITNM IP (IBM Tivoli Network Manager - since everything must have a confusing acronym). ITNM is now one of the premier network management tools in the industry and gives you root cause analysis. Combined with Netcool Omnibus for event management the solution is untouchable in the industry. It scales and it works EXTREMELY well. Unfortunately, since it was geared for Carriers it was not market priced for most enterprises. Now that has changed as IBM is more an Enterprise/Data Center focused company, then Carrier focused (although Netcool still rules that domain)
For Performance Management, Orion is simple and a great tool. However, to scale to carrier grade performance, TNPM (formerly Proviso) is the most scalable platform in the industry. It is not easy to stand up, but once its in , it runs forever and is geared to process massive amounts of data VERY quickly. IBM also got smart and added Cognos as the TNPM reporting tool, one of the best busines intelligence tools out there.....free....so reporting and mining all that data is taken care of. In addition, they are finally coming out with a Linux version and will be putting DB2 in the solution for free as an option, so you don't have to pay for OS and expensive Oracle licenses.
it is my understanding that TNPM has been displacing Infovista and Orion (sometimes the number of instances of those vs TNPM is 10:1) where scalability for carriers is key.
KM
Bryan,
I can't speak for the most recent releases of Tivoli and OpenView, but I can give you my perspective on the versions I've seen.
For many years, we were an HP OpenView Network Node Manager (NNM) shop. We had a unix team who supported all the other HP-UX systems, but we ran this one entirely out of Network Operations. NNM is a very powerful and configurable tool, but their presentation left much to be desired. While it can be configured to collect pretty much any variable available in a given mib, in general, it didn't have a very good means to display the data in a meaningful way. On top of that, the administrative burden associated with add/change/delete activities can be quite painstaking in environments where one is collecting a lot of different mib info and have a number of alerts configured.
For the entire duration of time that we had OV NMM in our environment, we managed and maintained the application, but never really derived enough value from it to justify the cost. At one point, some of our business units inquired about granting them access to our OV system to see status info and reports for their remote routers. We were able to provide some access via the web, but the lack of a truly useable presentation of data quickly lead to a lack of interest on our customers' part.
After this initial failure to provide visibility to our internal customers, as well as acknowledging the fact that we were not getting as much use out of our tools as we would like, we started looking for alternatives. This is when I first came across Solarwinds' products; specifically Orion. During the initial eval, it was quite apparent that Orion quickly and easily provides much more useable information than NNM, and it has a much more open architecture that lends itself to greater flexibility for integration with other web-based applications and data sources. The ability to tie various functions to custom properties greatly reduces the administrative effort involved in maintaining Orion.
Fast forwarding to today, our Orion instance, which is used for monitoring network infrastructure devices only, has become an absolutely invaluable tool for Network Services, as well as an important data source for other support groups. Our internal customers have full access to the same Orion data that we use to manage and maintain their environments, as well as other tools and information that we've integrated into the Orion website. This is something we never could have accomplished with NNM.
Recently, as a result of a major acquisition, we were tasked with consolidating support organizations and their associated monitoring and management tools. The competing incumbent tools consisted of Orion NPM, Cirrus, a number of SW Engineer's Edition Toolsets, Fluke Networks Netflow Tracker, IBM Tivoli NetView, Concord eHealth, MRTG, Cacti, Kiwi CatTools, CiscoWorks, and other miscellaneous tools. After weighing the pros and cons of each of these tools, and considering other comparable tools, the decision was made to expand the Orion and Cirrus instances to accommodate all managed devices across all companies. In addition, we will attempt to accommodate all the netflow exports via the existing Netflow Tracker instances. As part of this, we will be making a considerable investment in hardware and software, which is easily justified by the very successful deployment of these applications within one of our companies. Our server support group is now considering Orion as a replacement for some of their current tools as well.
In summary, while Orion is by no means a perfect tool, it has more than proven that it can stand up to (and beat) even the most expensive and complex of competitors in the marketplace, while offering a price point that blows the competition away. Solarwinds could definitely take some pointers from OV and Tivoli with regard to mapping and event correlation, but I firmly believe that anyone considering, or being forced to move away from Orion in favor of OV or Tivoli is walking backwards. :/
Sorry I didn't respond back but thanks for all of your insite and views. After what i have seen I don't see the cost/benefit with Tivoli...and I agree with it being difficult/complex.
Thanks again.
BB
Anyone have anything to say about Orion VS Spectrum? I am in the middle of that fight right now trying to justify Orion when Spectrum is the approved solution. Any help appreciated!
Hi bondrey--
Have you purchased Orion yet or does your purchase of it hinge on this?
M
Bondrey,
We currently have both Spectrum and Orion. At one time Spectrum was our primary NMS, but we purchased Orion plus several modules with the intent to replace Spectrum. Which is exactly what we've done. Orion is our primary and we still run Spectrum in another location just as a 'backup' system. Not sure what version of Spectrum you're running, ours is an older version. I can tell you that Orion can do so much more than our current version of Spectrum. I'd be happy to answer any specific questions you or your team might have.
Thanks,
Jeff
