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With Unicenter Network and Systems Management r11.1, CA is jumping onto the centralized management database bandwagon. The company also is adding to its venerable platform support for Microsofts SQL Server database products, and it is changing the systems primary user interface and enhancing its notification services.
Click here to read the full review of Unicenter NSM r11.1 Global.
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With Unicenter Network and Systems Management r11.1, CA is jumping onto the centralized management database bandwagon. The company also is adding to its venerable platform support for Microsofts SQL Server database products, and it is changing the systems primary user interface and enhancing its notification services.
CA is leaping several version numbers—the previous version of Unicenter NSM was 3.1—to bring Unicenter NSM onto the database that is now the central repository for management information that other CA products, including those that handle storage and inventory now use.
The new MCC (Management Command Center) is backward-compatible with the previous administration client, allaying eWeek Labs concerns that the new interface would be disruptive for current users.
Of importance to IT managers who are looking at an upgrade from the previous version of Unicenter NSM is the fact that r11.1 now focuses on the “S” in NSM over the “N.” As a result of CAs acquisition of Concord Communications, which itself had snapped up Aprismas Spectrum network management tools, Unicenter NSM r11.1 is primarily a systems management tool that integrates with CAs network management systems.
What remains unchanged is that Unicenter NSM r11.1 is a power tool that is best suited for organizations (usually large) that have a heterogeneous systems environment, including mainframe, Windows, Unix and Linux systems, along with a variety of network elements.
Additionally, Unicenter NSM r11.1 is an especially good fit when the number of these systems is large—in the thousands—and the systems are spread across geographic and logical boundaries. In other words, Unicenter NSM is for organizations whose IT managers must monitor and manage diverse systems that are tied together by business processes that exceed the capabilities of single-platform management tools.
As such, Unicenter NSM r11.1, which was released in September, requires a professional services engagement and considerable planning and staff training to support ongoing operations.
According to CA officials, organizations can expect to pay about $30,000 to $100,000 for a typical implementation, along with 20 percent annual maintenance. This pricing is in line with IBM Tivolis Enterprise Console, but it is more than Attachmates NetIQ AppManager suite or BMC Softwares infrastructure management tools.
Command and Control
The Unicenter MCC, a replacement for the Unicenter Explorer, is one of the most significant advances in the revamped Unicenter NSM. We used the MCC to get information about particular systems and other assets in our network, including SNMP-enabled network elements, without having to navigate through a number of component viewers.
The MCC quickly let us see information in the content pane of the user interface and let us switch among different views of the system, depending on whether we were looking at application performance measures or physical system measures (including how much of the system RAM or CPU was in use at a particular time).
The MCC adds other functions that should assist IT operations staff.
One of these new functions allowed us during tests to bookmark items, such as our e-mail systems, and then access those items by clicking on them in the favorites bar on the MCC screen. Because Unicenter NSM is designed for use in large-scale environments, this addition will likely be greatly appreciated by frontline operations staffers, who routinely have to access management information about the particular systems for which they are responsible.
The MCC is a big step forward for Unicenter NSM, but it also will require a significant effort for IT managers to configure for optimal use. This is certainly an area where professional services—usually provided by an organization other than CA—will come into play.
We recommend that IT managers specifically call out MCC implementation when evaluating third-party professional services organizations. Ask to see examples of MCC implementations, and look for multiple displays of system, application, and network monitoring and management.
The MCC integrates plug-ins that were previously available in Unicenter and adds support for the Alert Management System, Enterprise Management console logs and information from the Adaptive Dashboard Services and Web Reporting Services.
These components, along with several others, can share information with the MCC. This let us create actions for use as part of troubleshooting routines. For example, we were able to create an ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol) ping with a WorldView command that we assigned to a hot key. When a specific system reported a problem, we were able to select the system on the WorldView display and then use the hot key to ping the system to see if it was able to reply. The actions are stored by user and arent shared.
Next Page: Possible disruption for current Unicenter users
TKTK
Along with the MCC, CA has significantly revised the underpinnings of Unicenter NSM by building the product on a common MDB (Management Database). CA is playing catch-up here to a certain extent, using a centralized database that allows various CA components to share and leverage information about IT assets—from storage and security to job scheduling to application and database performance.
The MDB provides a single integrated schema for the management data stored by all CA products in the r11 family. Previously, Unicenter products used individual databases to store this information. Aside from the management complexity of administering these individual data stores, the older model often created nearly redundant workloads for IT operations by collecting and reporting on similar data.
Our tests show that the MDB may cause some disruption for current Unicenter users as data is migrated to the new centralized system. However, we think that the interruption to established IT operations will be worth it, as the administrative overhead associated with older versions of Unicenter will be reduced. New implementers of Unicenter will see a management system that works as they likely would expect.
While using Unicenter NSM r11.1, we were able to see the integration provided by the MDB. For example, the asset discovery process, itself much improved in this release of Unicenter NSM, was tightly integrated through a common schema with information about backup and storage management areas of IT for which CA has separate products.
The MDB also sets the stage for sharing information among CA Unicenter enterprise management installations running on mixed Windows, Linux and Unix platforms. Right now, there are limitations—for example, some Windows-specific actions are ignored on Linux systems, and vice versa. As Unicenter NSM grows into the use of MDB, we hope to see it translate commands among platforms in the same way that Centeris Likewise Management Suite does.
To its credit, Unicenter NSM monitors and manages a broad range of systems—far more than Windows- and Linux-based machines. In our tests, we were able to monitor systems based on Sun Microsystems and Novell operating systems, while also keeping tabs on our Cisco Systems switches and routers using SNMP.
In addition, the enhanced message record actions make it simpler than in previous versions of Unicenter NSM to customize agents to report on specific traps. In earlier versions of the product, we would have had to wait for the event to be created before having all the information needed to customize our alerts.
Next page: Evaluation Shortlist: Related Products.
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Evaluation Shortlist
Attachmates NetIQ AppManager Suite
A junior competitor to CA Unicenter NSM (www.netiq.com)
BMC Softwares infrastructure management tools
A portfolio of products (www.bmc.com)
IBM Tivolis Enterprise Console
The tried-and-true adversary of Unicenter marches on with a venerable array of system and network management tools (www-306.ibm.com/software/tivoli/products/enterprise-console)
Technical Director Cameron Sturdevant can be reached at [email protected].
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