comparative analysis of it monitoring tools october2015 final
TRANSCRIPT
Comparative Analysis of System & Network Monitoring Tools Comparison of CA Unified Infrastructure Management (CA UIM), SolarWinds, and Nagios . Apprize360 Intelligence, INC. October 2015 A Special Report Commissioned for CA Technologies, Inc.
2 | P a g e
Table of Contents
Overview and Summary ..................................................................................................................... 3
Study Methodology ........................................................................................................................... 4
What’s New in CA UIM? ..................................................................................................................... 4
CA UIM Configuration and Installation Process ................................................................................... 6
Comparative Benchmark Results ........................................................................................................ 7
CA UIM vs. SolarWinds ............................................................................................................................................ 7
CA UIM vs. Nagios XI ................................................................................................................................................ 9
Assessment of Specific Testing Scenarios .......................................................................................... 10
Monitoring Configuration ........................................................................................................................................ 10
Out-of-the-box Unified Dashboards ........................................................................................................................ 12
Bandwidth Utilization .............................................................................................................................................. 14
SLA Reporting .......................................................................................................................................................... 15
Ease of Use for Alarms, Dashboards, & Reporting .................................................................................................. 16
Remote Monitoring Considerations for Distributed Environments ..................................................... 17
Summary and Conclusions ................................................................................................................ 20
Figure 1: Total Time-to-Monitor .............................................................................................................................. 21
Table 3: Comparative Summary - Total Time-to-Monitor ....................................................................................... 21
Table 4: CA vs. SolarWinds ...................................................................................................................................... 22
Table 5: CA vs. Nagios ............................................................................................................................................. 24
Table 6: Response to Testing Scenarios ................................................................................................................... 26
Appendix A: Calculations….……………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 28
Product names mentioned herein may be trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective companies.
The information contained in this publication has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable. Apprize360, LLC disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy, completeness, or adequacy of such information and shall have no liability for errors, omissions, or inadequacies in such
information. This publication consists of the opinions of Apprize360’s research organization and should not be construed as presenting statements of fact. The opinions expressed herein are subject to change without notice.
3 | P a g e
Overview and Summary
CA Unified Infrastructure Management (CA UIM) is a
unified IT monitoring solution that offers deep
monitoring functionality within a single, unified view
and architecture.
Multiple IT monitoring platforms are available on the
market today, supporting the various needs of small,
medium-sized, and large enterprises, as well as
managed service providers (MSPs). To better
understand how CA Unified Infrastructure Management
compares to other IT monitoring platforms in terms of
functionality, operations, and usability, Apprize360
Intelligence studied and compared different IT
monitoring products including:
1. CA Unified Infrastructure Management Version
8.2 (CA UIM)
2. SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor
(NPM)
3. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor
(SAM)
4. SolarWinds Bandwidth Analyzer Pack
5. SolarWinds Netflow Traffic Analyzer (NTA)
6. Nagios XI
Key Study Findings
CA (UIM) is a single, unified solution, and not several point products integrated together with a common GUI. For example it takes five SolarWinds products on average to provide the same level of functionality as CA UIM
CA UIM had the “fastest time to monitor” (time from download to active device monitoring) among the products studied, providing a more rapid time to value.
AS CA UIM is a single and easy to use platform saving network administrators up to 14.3 hours per month in platform administrative tasks.
CA UIM provides easier and intuitive unified system and network analysis capabilities that speed mean time to resolution.
CA UIM supports remote monitoring needs without requiring a dedicated VPN connection to remote sites. This resulted in less configuration & management of the IT monitoring platform.
CA UIM is the most complete solution meeting the needs of specific analyzed use cases, such as bandwidth utilization and root cause analysis.
CA UIM’s differentiator is over all ease of use as well as out of box advance analytics to proactively identify potential performance issues and SLA management report to provide business centric views.
4 | P a g e
Study Methodology
Apprize360 downloaded fully functional trial versions of each of the IT monitoring products from
CA, SolarWinds, and Nagios to understand the deployment and operational experience that a
typical customer would encounter with each platform. The comparative analysis was performed
using a Dell PowerEdge T620 Server with 768GB of memory across 24 DIMM slots and 64TB of
disk space. For CA UIM and the four SolarWinds products, the operating system used was
Microsoft Server 2012. For Nagios XI, the same server was used, but it was partitioned to run
Linux Red Hat Enterprise. In all cases, configuration and discovery was completed on a network
with 100 end devices. Downloads of the trial versions of the platforms were carried out using a
T1 connection that averaged 20-30MBPS Internet speeds.
CA Unified Infrastructure Management (CA UIM) – What’s New?
CA has made significant improvements and enhancements with the latest release of CA Unified
Infrastructure Management (CA UIM) primarily in the following areas:
1. Faster and easier platform deployment
2. Enhanced Analytics: Dashboard, reports and views
3. Improved network monitoring
4. Support for Big Data Monitoring:
In this whitepaper, Apprize360 primary used CA UIM version 8.2 in our test environment to
evaluate UIM versus other vendor platform. In addition, we also evaluated the user experience
and feature sets also in CA UIM version 8.3.1.
1) Faster and Easier Platform Deployment
CA Technologies has invested significantly in the deployment experience of CA Unified
Infrastructure Management Version. The platform uses a self-extraction application from Flexera
Software’s InstallAnywhere, making the guided downloaded experience easy and quick.
Streamlined user-flow with fewer screens and mouse clicks provide a simplified install experience
and robust pre-checks and validation to help ensure a successful upgrade or fresh install. CA has
included helpful on-screen tips and installation guide points, which allow IT administrators to
prepare for future configuration and installation steps with CA UIM. The new release also
includes bulk configuration capabilities for large network, virtualized and hybrid cloud
environments that makes monitoring configuration a lot easier.
5 | P a g e
2) Enhanced Analytics: Dashboard, reports and views
Network Interface views: These views provide a rich view into critical networking
components showing detailed information about each interface, making it easy to find
problems or issues.
Summary Analytics: New, summary analytics provide rapid, out-of-the-box analytics
including:
Health index report – rapid identification of under-performing IT assets with
historical trending to identify aging perform of a specific component or group of
assets
At a Glance Reports – Time series data for a network component or device
Top N Reports – Tabular report that can be filtered by multiple variables to
pinpoint under-performing components.
Advanced Analytics: There are new standard reports that make proactively identifying
performance issues easy:
Situations to Watch - The Situations to Watch report displays the number of days
before an infrastructure element reaches a threshold violation.
Trend and Group Trend Reports - Trend and Group Trend reports display time-
series data for either: a single metric and a set of up to 10 devices or interfaces
within a group.
3) Improved network monitoring
In addition to improving performance and vendor device support. The recent releases of CA UIM
have added the following features to really strengthen the network monitoring capabilities of the
product
Integrated Network Utilization and bandwidth analysis: With the integration with CA
NFA, now CA UIM users get insights into application consumption on the network through
a streamlined workflow.
Bulk configuration: Allows user to use template to rapidly configure monitoring of large
network environments.
Self-Certification: With this new release you no longer have to wait days for vendors to
certify new devices. Using this feature you can now onboard new devices in a day not
weeks.
4) Support for Big Data Monitoring:
CA UIM now allows you to monitor performance of traditional IT infrastructure along with Big
Data environments such as Hadoop, Cassandra and MongoDB, through a single, unified
architecture.
6 | P a g e
CA UIM Configuration and Installation Process
The installation process for CA Unified Infrastructure Management Version 8.2 is fundamentally
different from those of the other IT monitoring products offered by Nagios, and SolarWinds. CA
Technologies has made sure that everything – from the product download to the installation
process – is seamless and easy to complete. CA Technologies uses Flexera Software’s
InstallAnywhere platform for CA UIM installation, which makes installation and execution quick
and uncomplicated. The only prerequisite is that the host server must be running Java in order
for the installation to be completed.
During the installation process, CA UIM displays on-screen hints to prepare the IT administrator
for the subsequent configuration and device discovery phases. Both Nagios and SolarWinds
utilize a flat transfer of a ZIP file, which requires separate execution and manual file extraction.
While no download or installation errors occurred with any of the platforms reviewed, the
download and installation process of CA UIM was by far the easiest to use of all of the products
assessed during this study.
After the initial installation, the
configuration of CA UIM
continues to be straightforward.
Of all of the vendor platforms
reviewed, CA Unified
Infrastructure Management
Version 8.2 was by far the easiest
and most straight forward to
configure and begin monitoring.
The out-of-the-box automated
discovery process took 16
minutes to identify and log all
100 devices. After the
automated discovery process was completed, CA UIM immediately began monitoring devices for
performance, highlighting any network latency and individual device performance issues. The CA
UIM Unified Service Manager (USM) dashboard gives the user a complete view of the entire IT
environment that was being monitored. This includes supporting dynamic drill-down into specific
areas of concern, right from the USM dashboard. Within the dashboard, users can also identify
device performance issues by geography, measure overall performance, and review the latest
alarms. The single dashboard provides a complete, unified view of an IT infrastructure, and is
easy to access throughout the product, whenever the user wants to proactively review
performance. However, if a user desires a more Proactive approach, CA UIM alarm capabilities
CA UIM Unified Service Manager
7 | P a g e
allow for specific thresholds to be established for device and network performance. CA UIM will
then alert the IT administrator through an alarm or email notification concerning any
performance-related alarms. The dashboard portlet in USM provides improved usability,
reliability, and performance, and allows
the user to view dashboards on mobile
tablet devices.
Reporting is a significant strength of CA
UIM. The reporting process is
completely interactive, allowing the user
to drag-and-drop specific devices onto
the reporting screen for immediate graphing. Reporting can be initiated by a specific device, by
a group of devices, or by quality of service. The platform’s advanced filtering capabilities enable
granular reporting down to the specific probe level. In addition, CA UIM version 8.2 supports the
ability to import non-IT data, such as sales and revenue, to display alongside IT data.
Comparative Benchmark Results
Installation & Configuration
Apprize360’s assessment discovered several differences in the installation and configuration
processes, as well as in overall operations, between the various platforms included in this study.
Overall, CA Unified Infrastructure Management Version 8.2 led the group, with regard to overall
ease-of-installation, configuration, and operations, as well as speed of download and installation.
In addition, unlike SolarWinds and Nagios, CA UIM offers more than a time-limited trial.
SolarWinds only allows users 30 days of free use of its respective platforms, while Nagios provides
a 60-day trial period. By comparison, CA offers a free version of the product, called CA UIM Snap,
which allows users to monitor up to 30 devices for as long as they want. For more info and to
download, visit: www.ca.com/snap.
The full quantitative results of this study can be found in Appendix A of this document, beginning
on page 22.
CA UIM vs. SolarWinds
SolarWinds on average requires multiple products and double the time to monitor vs. CA UIM
All four of the assessed SolarWinds products use the same download and installation method.
SolarWinds requires users to download a ZIP file containing an auto-extractable application that
must then be manually activated. Unlike CA UIM, SolarWinds offers no guided installation wizard
to help the user through the installation process. In addition, the SolarWinds products involve
several different steps that are needed to complete the installation. With CA UIM, it took 62
minutes to download, install, configure, and discover 100 devices. However, more than double
CA UIM offers a single, unified architecture and
dashboard. It is this type of easy-to-use navigation
that gives CA UIM a marked advantage over
SolarWinds as the more complex the navigation the
longer it would take to resolve critical issues
8 | P a g e
that time was required to complete the same
installation process with the four SolarWinds products.
SolarWinds NPM took the longest to deploy, requiring
roughly two hours before active network monitoring
could begin. If you would like to monitor a virtual
machine that’s another product with SolarWinds
whereas CA UIM provides out of the box monitoring for virtualization environments such as
VMware and Hyper-V.
Table 1: CA Unified Infrastructure Management 8.2 vs. SolarWinds
CA UIM 8.2 SolarWinds
NPM
SolarWinds Bandwidth
Analyzer
SolarWinds Netflow Traffic
Analyzer
SolarWinds SAM
Download 15 min 11 mins 1 mins 1 min 10 mins
Installation 15 min 52 mins 34 mins 25 min 60 mins
Configuration 16 min 25 mins 15 mins 18 min 33 mins
Discovery 16 min 35 mins 35 mins 35 mins 35 mins
Total Time to Monitor
62 minutes 123 minutes 85 minutes 79 minutes 138 minutes
After the relevant files are downloaded and the installation process is completed, the
configuration of the various SolarWinds products varies slightly, due to their individual purposes.
One issue that was quickly apparent in this study is that SolarWinds requires at least four separate
products to meet the functionality found in the single instance of CA UIM. Rather than having to
load, navigate, and analyze data from four separate products – none of which are integrated
together for dashboard analysis or reporting purposes in the trial versions – CA UIM offers a
single, unified architecture and dashboard. It is this type of easy-to-use navigation that gives CA
UIM a marked advantage over SolarWinds as the more complex the navigation the longer it
would take to resolve critical issues.
SolarWinds NPM Installation
To install SolarWinds NPM, concurrent Web IIS must
also be installed. There are two steps to the
SolarWinds NPM installation process: The Installer
and the Configuration Wizard. The majority of the
focus with the Installer is deploying the SQL Server
components and configuring IIS. The Configuration
Wizard is focused on NPM, unpacking website into
IIS and creating permissions.
Next the Network Sonar Wizard automatically launches for discovery. The discovery wizard
requires the user to enter in SNMP credentials for discovery and then goes on to discover
SolarWinds’ tabular structure does
not allow the user to see the same
level of broad activity as CA UIM
With CA UIM, it took 62 minutes to
download, install, configure, and
discover 100 devices. However, more
than double that time was required to
complete the same installation process
with the four SolarWinds products.
9 | P a g e
VMware, Windows devices, and scope of the network through an IP address range. This step can
take anywhere from 30 min to 45 min depending upon the size and structure of your network.
SolarWinds Bandwidth Analyzer Installation
SolarWinds Bandwidth Analyzer Pack is an add-on module to SolarWinds NPM and requires
concurrent use of NPM as well as SolarWinds Network Traffic Analyzer (NTA). SolarWinds
Bandwidth Analyzer integrates well within NPM, including a shared and single web console with
the NPM.
Strictly speaking, SolarWinds Bandwidth Analyzer and NPM are two separate products. However,
we discovered that but NTA integrates tightly with NPM so they can both be managed from the
same Orion web console. NTA only took a few minutes to install and provided a wizard to help
configure its various services. NTA functions as an extension of NPM and on completion we found
a new tab for it in the Orion web interface. From the switch network topology view we could see
which ports had devices attached.
The NTA summary screen provides an overview of the flow traffic with graphs showing detected
applications plus the top conversations and busiest endpoints. There are numerous additional
tabs provided so users can move to viewing application activity and bandwidth usage, NetFlow
sources, receivers and transmitters. This is where the differentiation between SolarWinds and
CA UIM really begins as the tabular structure does not allow you to see the same level of broad
activity as CA UIM. With CA UIM, you see all network traffic and can drill-down into specific areas
as well as automatically be alerted to top under-performing resources.
The SolarWinds NTA application graph provides additional information, including the amount of
bandwidth being consumed up by email, web browsing, VoIP, FTP and media streaming. Users
can also select an application and drill down and see bandwidth usage in even more detail.
NTA works with NPM’s alerting module so it can issue flow related alerts. These alerts can range
from endpoints using excessive bandwidth to issues with traffic management policies. Alerts are
configured from the Orion Alert Manager and range from sending emails to running scripts.
The predefined SolarWinds dashboards displayed most information that is needed to know to
better understand bandwidth utilization. It included helpful information, such as displaying the
top ten endpoints as well as top 10 NetFlow sources by percentage of utilization.
CA UIM vs. Nagios XI
Nagios XI is an open-source IT monitoring product that runs on Linux servers. In a similar
approach to SolarWinds, Nagios offers a free 60-day trial period with a fully functional license for
Nagios XI. After 60 days, the user must decide whether to pay a licensing fee to keep Nagios XI
functional. Nagios XI is licensed on a per-monitoring-server basis. License pricing is determined
10 | P a g e
by the number of hosts (nodes) that the user intends to monitor. There are no restrictions on the
number of services that can be monitored with XI.
While Nagios XI is a relatively inexpensive solution,
an experienced IT administrator may be needed for
its successful deployment and on-going
management. Downloading Nagios XI is a multi-
step process that lacks the guided process offered
by CA UIM. After installation, the configuration
process is highly technical, requiring the manual
development of discovery queries and manual alert
generation without on-screen guidance. It took
almost three and half hours (197 minutes) to download, install, configure, and discover 100
devices with Nagios XI, while the same routine took 62 minutes in total for CA UIM
Table 2: CA UIM 8.2 vs. Nagios XI
CA UIM 8.2 Nagios XI
Download 15 min 16 min
Installation 15 min 22 min
Configuration 16 min 118 min
Discovery 16 min 41 min
Total Time to Monitor
62 minutes 197 minutes
Summary of Testing Scenarios In addition to benchmark tests of the vendor platforms, Apprize360 created specific testing
scenarios that were applied to each vendor’s products. The full scenario testing results can be
found in Table 7 below. The following is a summary analysis of the test results, which highlights
the scenario responses and capabilities assessed for each vendors’ platform.
Configuration & Deployment
CA Unified Infrastructure Management
One of the advantages of CA UIM is the “agent-optional” approach. This allows the user to access
to both an agent-based and an agentless monitoring configuration, based upon their specific
needs and their environment. CA UIM’s agent-less monitoring option collects information from
“black box” systems, such as hypervisors, SAN storage systems, network devices, SaaS, and cloud
environments where no agents are permitted. CA UIM agent-based monitoring provides spooling
of performance metrics in disconnected environments so no data is ever lost in outages.
It took almost three and half hours (197
minutes) to download, install,
configure, and discover 100 devices
with Nagios XI, while the same routine
took 62 minutes in total for CA UIM
11 | P a g e
CA UIM uses what it calls a “robot” (analogous to an “agent”) to collect and disseminate
information about a managed device. Customers that want to leverage on-board monitoring
configurations install a lightweight robot on each managed device. These robots provide the
communication functionality required for a system to be monitored in a CA UIM domain. CA UIM
offers the “Automated Deployment Engine” (ADE) that enables administrators to quickly and
centrally distribute agents to remote target servers, removing the need to manually install the
robot binary onto each system directly.
CA UIM then leverages one or more “probes” to monitor specific components/technologies on a
managed device. For example, one common probe, the CDM probe, is responsible for monitoring
CPU, disk and memory utilization on target hosts. Over 150 probes are available, allowing users
to manage the entire IT infrastructure, including servers, storage, network devices, applications
and databases as well as user response time monitoring and data center power consumption.
Probes can be easily deployed across an entire network via a simple drag-and-drop interface—
using a template based approach or programmatically in an automated fashion. CA also offers a
Software Development Kit for its probes as well.
SolarWinds
SolarWinds NPM can monitor the performance of SNMPv1, SNMPv2, or SNMPv3-enabled devices
within a network. SolarWinds NPM uses Network Sonar discovery in the NPM Web Console to
discover objects for monitoring. To discover and add a larger number of devices across a
network, the Network Sonar and Network Sonar Results Wizards are available. The web console
provides Web Node Management to add individual objects for monitoring.
After Network Sonar Discovery has populated the SolarWinds Database with the network objects
to be included in monitoring, node and volume information is passed to the Business Layer. The
Business Layer passes node and volume information to the Collector Polling Controller and
provides licensing information to the SolarWinds Information Service (SWIS). At this point, the
SolarWinds Collector Polling Controller creates the required polling jobs and then passes them
on to the Job Engine. The Job Engine performs the requested polling jobs and then passes the
results to the Collector Polling Controller. There, all polling results are placed into the Microsoft
Message Queue (MSMQ). Here, the Collector Data Processor pulls polling results from the MSMQ
and performs calculations and then inserts these results into the SolarWinds database.
With SolarWinds SAM, there is no monitoring coverage of virtualized devices. For use cases with
virtualized device monitoring, users would be required to co-deploy and license SolarWinds
Virtualization Manager.
12 | P a g e
Nagios XI
The Nagios XI Monitoring Wizard is used to
configure and monitor a new device. After
the device is discovered, a separate wizard
is run to configure monitored elements.
Each device category requires a separate
wizard (see diagram). In addition, Nagios XI
requires multiple tabs and open windows to complete a task that other products can complete
in a single screen. This makes device configuration potentially time consuming and complicated
to conduct.
Out-of-The-Box Dashboards, Analytics, & Reports
CA Unified Infrastructure Management
CA UIM provides intuitive, up-to-date
portal views of monitoring data.
CA UIM features a monitoring portal
that provides a complete view of the
systems, networks and services that
underpin vital business services,
whether those are based on any
combination of virtualized
infrastructures, SaaS offerings, cloud-based services, or outsourced environments. In addition,
the solution offers multi-tenant capabilities that enable services providers, or enterprises, to
monitor and manage the infrastructures of multiple clients or users.
Out of the box, configurable dashboards offer end-users and service providers real-time access
to the monitoring data that matters to them. CA UIM reports provide snapshots and historical
context for quality of service, performance and SLA compliance monitoring. In addition
dashboards can be tailored to specific users, groups and roles, enabling users to see any type of
data that matters to them in a single view. For service providers, dashboards can be branded and
customized for each end user. CA UIM also supports numerous out-of-the-box dashboards such
as VMware health and performance, power consumption, Amazon Web Services, and data center
performance.
CA UIM also offers advance trend analysis and summary dashboards that are not found in
SolarWinds or Nagios. For example:
Situations to watch: This analysis displays the number of days before a system reaches a
threshold violation, this predicting when a device will exceed a performance metric or when
storage will be exceed on a specific device.
CA UIM also offers advance trend analysis and
summary dashboards that are not found in
SolarWinds or Nagios
13 | P a g e
Health index: OOTB dashboard that analyzes under-performing devices and services. Using
an easy to analyze 0-100 scale, we discovered that a user can quickly see which devices and
services – or even categories of devices and services – that are currently underperforming.
The CA UIM Health index metric is also stored historically to track and identify health trends.
The index is based off of existing threshold configurations, so there is no additional
configuration is needed and the metric is ready by default).
Trend report: We found that the CA UIM Trend Report to be a useful troubleshooting tool
that enables rapid diagnosis of root cause through visual correlation of metrics. When used
on a group, the Trend Report shows a single metric across a user selected set of elements
from the group. When the Trend report is run on a single element, multiple metrics can be
selected and graphed simultaneously to visualize interdependencies.
The summary analytics are really useful in proactively resolving infrastructure issues while
flexible trend reporting allows IT operations teams to not only identify bottlenecks but make also
application, system or network design suggestions to development teams.
SolarWinds
SolarWinds NPM users can select out-of-the-box dashboards or can build their own custom
dashboards via drag-and-drop placement charts and reports. Dashboards are also dynamic,
allowing for the user to click and drill-down into additional data.
One area where we discovered some complexity is when integrating specific data into NPM
dashboards. For example, a NPM user is still required to log into the server and use the old
Windows application when configuring alerting.
Nagios XI
Reporting is area in which Nagios XI is inferior when compared to CA UIM. Nagios requires the
use of a report writer to generate reports on specific devices, alerts, and performance analysis.
The Nagios XI report writer involves a multiple-screen, multi-step process that takes time to set
up and to use to generate reports. In addition, Nagios XI reports are heavily focused on node
availability. Users can run a “report summary” of specific host availability as well as nine pre-
canned available reports, including a summary, event log, notification log, and bandwidth usage
report.
Dashboards are another area in which CA UIM has a comparative advantage over Nagios XI. While
the main Nagios XI dashboard provides information on overall performance state, as well as
alerts on performance issues, Nagios has no single, unified dashboard for understanding IT health
on one screen. Instead, Nagios utilizes multiple dashboards on multiple separate webpages,
which are categorized by the specific host or service group.
14 | P a g e
Bandwidth Performance Reporting
CA Unified Infrastructure Management Version 8.2
CA UIM includes bandwidth analysis and
utilization pervasive and integrated within
most dashboards and reporting options as
an inherent analytical metric. In addition to
bandwidth utilization and performance
analysis directly within most dashboards,
other important metrics including network
latency and response time analysis are also
directly accessible. In addition to these
important bandwidth performance metrics,
users can dynamically drill-down into performance of the network, a specific asset, or application
directly from a dashboard. With SolarWinds, there are up to 5 products that would need to be
co-licensed, deployed, and managed to monitor bandwidth utilization and performance
compared to a single CA UIM instance.
As part of its April 2015 release, CA also integrated CA Network Flow Analysis version 9.3.1. This
integration allows for the network flow analysis to be included in CA UIM analysis. Network flow
analysis provides visibility into the composition of network traffic across the infrastructure
allowing users to understand how a network is being used, so administrators can manage
priorities, resources and workloads. Now CA UIM can better analyze IP traffic information to
allocate workloads and increase security through detection of malware & DDOS attacks.
SolarWinds Bandwidth Analyzer Pack
SolarWinds’ approach to bandwidth analysis has historically been through using and integrating
a separate application. While that is still true today, SolarWinds has made strides in making this
integration more seamless, including supporting bandwidth utilization as an integrated report in
the NPM dashboards and reporting sections. Today, the Bandwidth Analyzer Pack is a seamless
integration with SolarWinds NPM. The SolarWinds Bandwidth Analyzer Pack does not support
this information easily accessible directly in general root cause analysis dashboards or reports. It
also does not automatically calculate network latency and response times as a general
performance metrics.
When creating a bandwidth utilization scenario of 20 videos on 20 different devices on a 100
device network, SolarWinds did not alert to bandwidth utilization until 22 minutes after all the
videos had be started. In addition, unlike CA UIM, SolarWinds requires the user to navigate to a
separate screen and dashboard to view bandwidth utilization. It also does not provide context to
the impact of overall network performance from the offending performance issue. With CA UIM,
Unlike CA UIM, SolarWinds requires the user to
navigate to a separate screen and dashboard to
view bandwidth utilization. It also does not
provide context to the impact of overall network
performance from the offending performance
issue
15 | P a g e
you can quickly understand the performance offending root cause quickly, in a few number of
clicks, and all on one screen.
Nagios XI
Bandwidth utilization is a separate
dashboard and report within Nagios
and is not an integrated performance
metric. In addition, Nagios XI only
covers bandwidth utilization of
network devices –such as switches
and routers- and not applications,
network storage devices, or other IT
assets. Nagios XI also lacks important bandwidth performance metrics, such as network latency
and response times, within its reports and dashboards.
Service Level Agreement (SLA) Reporting
CA Unified Infrastructure Management Version 8.2
CA UIM includes a robust SLA tracking and reporting module that monitors operations and
business service levels against SLA targets and forecasts violations with warning alerts. This part
of the CA UIM solution provides a graphical interface for defining SLA parameters, which can
include the compliance period and operating periods, exclusion windows, the SLA target
compliance percentage and more. Web-based SLA compliance reports with drill-down
granularity are auto-generated and auto-distributed.
The CA UIM SLA reporting and monitoring solution will also continuously perform calculations to
determine if the current period SLA is safely in compliance. It will determine if a SLA breach is
imminent should the problem or condition be allowed to persist. CA UIM SLA reports include
color-coded SLA compliance/breach trend indicators with forecasted breach date and time.
Warning and critical level alerts can be generated when the percentage compliance decreases to
predefined thresholds.
It is important to note that any metric can be tracked for SLA reporting within CA UIM, including
non-IT metrics that may be important to your organization. As an example, if the number of
users logged into an e-commerce site or average sales price per transaction metrics were held in
an external database, CA UIM could collect such metrics and analyze them for SLA purposes. This
module can help eliminate time consuming manual reporting.
SolarWinds
SolarWinds’ IP SLA Manager is a free add-on module to SolarWinds NPM that is designed to
identify site-specific or WAN-related network performance issues. SolarWinds IP SLA Manager
Nagios lacks a single, unified dashboard for
understanding IT health on one screen. Instead,
Nagios utilizes multiple dashboards on multiple
separate webpages, which are categorized by the
specific host or service group
16 | P a g e
can help locate which devices on a
network actually support IP SLA and
automatically setup operations for those
devices. SolarWinds IP SLA also allows
users to monitor WAN applications by
taking the performance-pulse of
underlying network protocols, including
DNS lookups, FTP, HTTP, TCP connect, and UDP jitter, while continuing to monitor VoIP call paths.
Note that SolarWinds does not appear to offer a “global” SLA monitoring or reporting application
that allows customers to mix and match cross-domain key performance indicators.
Nagios XI
Nagios XI does not have SLA support out-of-the-box, making this a difficult solution to support
MSPs as well as internal IT organizations that have SLAs with internal business units or external
service providers.
Clearly CA UIM provides comprehensive and out of box SLA management and reporting
capabilities that other products don’t. These capabilities are necessary if you want
Overall ease of use – Unified Views, Workflows, Alarms, Device Views, & Reporting
CA Unified Infrastructure Management Version 8.2
CA UIM alarm management helps IT operations personnel manage the flood of events that come
in from the IT infrastructure by eliminating duplicate event signals and filtering events according
to operational or business priorities. The goals are to improve the mean time to isolate and repair
problems and to prioritize IT support efforts according to business process value. Through the
solution’s custom filters, customers can set alerts only when an exception occurs, such as an
outage, failure, or threshold breach. CA UIM alarm management helps IT organizations reduce
the time it takes to troubleshoot problems by consolidating events from various devices, servers
and applications and providing the ability to assign alarms to the right IT staff.
CA UIM features a monitoring portal that offers a single role-based, intuitive view of all
monitoring data. This portal extends the multi-tenant capabilities of CA UIM, enabling service
providers to effectively report service level agreement (SLA) status and monitoring information
to clients, while offering clear, executive-ready dashboards to display SLA status for in-house
stake holders. Out-of-the-box portlets and end user level customization allow CA UIM users to
adjust and optimize their monitoring views.
With SolarWinds, each metric and performance area
has its own dashboard or report. This makes it very
difficult to visualize network performance as a whole
and understand more global factors
17 | P a g e
SolarWinds
SolarWinds NPM reporting is generated through the “Report Writer” feature embedded within
the web console. SolarWinds Report Writer also allows customers to create custom network
monitoring reports using SQL. A variety of predefined reports are also included in the NPM
deployment.
One area of deficiency is the area of ad hoc report generation. While there are a number of pre-
defined reports, generating an ad hoc report on specific devices or groups took time and several
different steps to generate. Reporting is also limited to non-graphical based tables.
With SolarWinds, each metric and performance area has its own dashboard or report. This makes
it very difficult to visualize network performance as a whole and understand more global factors,
such as bandwidth utilization, as part of the other all contributing factors.
Nagios XI
Reporting is area in which Nagios XI is inferior when compared to CA UIM. Nagios requires the
use of a report writer to generate reports on specific devices, alerts, and performance analysis.
The Nagios XI report writer involves a multiple-screen, multi-step process that takes time to set
up and to use to generate reports. In addition, Nagios XI reports are heavily focused on node
availability. Users can run a “report summary” of specific host availability as well as nine pre-
canned available reports, including a summary, event log, notification log, and bandwidth usage
report.
Remote Monitoring Considerations for Distributed Environments
The ability to monitor remote systems and networks is a growing need among MSPs and
enterprises that need to observe remote networks over the public Internet (Particularly the ones
with remote locations such as retail outlets, distribution centers, hospitals etc.). MSPs typically
offer “remote monitoring” services for their clients, which require the ability to monitor the
availability and performance of the infrastructures within their customers’ internal firewalls.
Many corporations also need to monitor remote branch offices such as retail stores, distribution
centers or clinics that are not connected to their corporate backbones.
While all of the solutions evaluated in this report are able to monitor IT elements within a local
environment, the ability to monitor remote customer networks under a single monitoring
domain varies among vendors. In order to achieve remote monitoring visibility, any solution will
require network connectivity to communicate with client devices and systems. Additionally,
monitoring tools are needed to understand Network Address Translator (NAT) and duplicate
private IP addresses from customer to customer. Finally, customer firewalls need to be
considered, as many companies want their data to be transmitted securely and with a small
footprint (i.e., minimal to zero firewall ports opened). As part of this report, the vendor products
18 | P a g e
included in this analysis were assessed in order to understand their remote monitoring
capabilities and ability to best address the needs of MSPs and enterprises.
CA Unified Infrastructure Management
CA UIM includes deep remote
monitoring capabilities, which were
developed in the earliest versions of
the product. Customers that need
to monitor remote locations,
offices, and networks can do so by
installing a software-based “hub”
inside the client network.
The CA UIM hub then securely
communicates monitoring
information from the remote site to
the primary CA UIM server, over a
single port using an SSL tunnel. No
third-party VPN technology is
required, and CA Technologies does
not impose any extra charge for this
connectivity capability.
CA UIM portal access can also be granted to each
client, so that customers only have access to
monitoring data from their local hubs, which enables
MSPs to supply live content to their clients under a
single CA UIM deployment. CA UIM delivers multi-
tenancy support to MSPs that leverage these
capabilities.
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor requires additional products and architectural changes
There are four options for enabling remote monitoring with SolarWinds NPM. These include:
Option 1: Centralized deployment – This involves the centralized deployment of NPM, and
then the utilization of VPN connections to each remote network. If no VPN connection exists,
NPM must be deployed at each site, with access made possible via a web console. This option
can be costly and can increase monitoring complexity for MSPs and large enterprises, which
have to use multiple VPNs for this arrangement.
CA UIM Monitor Multi-Site Deployment
CA UIM has the advantage remote
site monitoring. It reduces the cost
and complexity of remote
monitoring by providing out of the
box capabilities.
19 | P a g e
Option 2: Distributed deployment – This option allows for the deployment of NPM at each
customer site. Data from each NPM deployment is then sent to and processed by a separate
SolarWinds module, called SolarWinds Enterprise Operations Console (EOC), at the MSP’s
NOC. This option is very complex for MSPs, and requires a standalone SolarWinds NPM
deployment for each customer. Additionally, the SolarWinds Enterprise Operations Console,
which is the software required to combine all of the remote installations into a single MSP
NOC view, starts at a price of US$4,995 per deployment.
Option 3: Hybrid approach – This option is used when the customer has implemented more
than one SolarWinds product with one product in a centralized model and the others in a
distributed model. Similar to option 2 above, SolarWinds EOC is used to connect all the
platforms together for data collection and analysis. MSPs considering this option may be
concerned over the lack of standardization across their customer base, and the need for an
individual strategy for each client.
Option 4: N-able – SolarWinds also recommends that customers with a highly distributed
architecture consider their new N-able product to avoid remote monitoring challenges. N-
able is a remote monitoring company that SolarWinds acquired.
CA UIM has the advantage remote site monitoring. It reduces the cost and complexity of remote
monitoring by providing out of the box capabilities. You don’t need buy, implement or manage
more tools to make this happen. Plus it as a dedicated VPN connection is not required for each
case of communication to each remote site, you save bandwidth costs
Nagios XI required additional customizations
Like SolarWinds, Nagios suggests a full-time VPN connection to remote locations as its preferred
option. The company also offers a “distributed monitoring” configuration option. However,
employing this option can become very complicated, as it requires an additional module called
the Multi-Nagios Tactical Overview System (MNTOS) monitoring aggregation tool. MNTOS allows
the Nagios XI user to setup an aggregated view of multiple Nagios monitoring servers, making it
the preferred tool for distributed monitoring environments (similar to the Enterprise Operations
Consoles’ role for SolarWinds).
It is suggested that users fully research their remote monitoring options with Nagios, in order to
monitor remote customer networks with the platform. While Nagios’ open source offering is free
of software licensing costs, those savings can be quickly burned as a result of the human hours
required to get the environment up and running – and to keep it operational.
20 | P a g e
Summary and Conclusions CA Unified Infrastructure Management Version 8.2 is an easy-to-use and quick-to-deploy IT
monitoring solution. Of the solutions assessed, the installation and configuration process for CA
Unified Infrastructure Management Version 8.2 was easy and enabled rapid to time value
through quickly enabling network monitoring as well as less overall monthly management time.
There are several factors that make CA UIM unique:
1) CA UIM monitoring functionality is hosted in a single, unified platform. To create equivalent
monitoring strategy, a user would be required to deploy four to five SolarWinds products to
provide the functionality offered by a single instance of CA UIM. Each SolarWinds platform
also has its own database, which requires database setup, configuration, and ongoing
maintenance. There is significant time savings of having a single platform with a single
database. Based upon our experience with SolarWinds and CA UIM in this study, having all
your system and network monitoring capabilities in a single platform can save a network
administrative up to 14.3 hours per month vs. the SolarWinds suite. This means that CA UIM
users can save up to 7 days per year from more efficient direct access to commonly requested
monitoring actions, reports, and lower on-going maintenance and support of the platform
(see appendix B for calculations).
2) CA UIM supports a guided installation and configuration process. This offers a deployment
process that is quick and intuitive, allowing for the correct decisions to be made during initial
configuration.
3) CA UIM had the fastest “time to monitor” (time from download, through configuration, and
to reporting on device monitoring), at 62 minutes. The closest alternative was SolarWinds
NPM at 123 minutes, which is almost twice as long as the time for CA UIM and is limited to
only network monitoring (see Table 4 and Figure 1 below).
4) CA UIM’s drag-and-drop reporting made deep device reporting simple and fast.
Performance metrics are easily and quickly accessible through dynamic access rather than
having to run another report or navigate to another dashboard.
5) CA UIM has integrated network flow and bandwidth utilization analytics. CA UIM has
integrated network flow and bandwidth utilization within most dashboards, allowing for fast
root cause analysis and prioritization and forecasting of workloads.
6) CA UIM’s discovery process was the fastest in identifying devices and beginning active
device monitoring. CA UIM also began immediately calculating important performance
metrics – such as error condition diagnosis, root cause analysis, and bandwidth utilization –
immediately upon discovery.
21 | P a g e
7) CA Unified Infrastructure Management Version supports easier remote monitoring for
MSPs and enterprise environments through a single, unified platform.
8) CA UIM’s support for OOTB support for big data monitoring: With CA UIM and the big data
probes, companies can support “big data” use cases. CA UIM allows companies to use the
Hadoop, Cassandra and MongoDB probes to extend monitoring coverage into big data
technologies.
9) OOTB support for integration of non-IT data: CA UIM supports integration of both IT & non-
IT data together for holistic analysis. CA UIM we discovered we could view IT performance
trends reports alongside network and sales data to provide a single view of how critical
business services were impact by IT performance and how IT performance was potentially
impacting the customer experience. For example, the question of “How were sales impacted
by server downtime?” could be addressed by overlaying IT performance data alongside both
sales data as well as customer experience and customer satisfaction data such as an NPS data
(Net Promoter Score).
10) CA Unified Infrastructure Management Version 8.2 was the most responsive, and was
capable of addressing most of the testing scenarios without any additional add-on modules.
Table 3: Comparative Summary - Total Time to Monitor
CA UIM v8.2 SolarWinds
NPM
SolarWinds Bandwidth
Analyzer
SolarWinds Traffic
Analyzer
SolarWinds SAM
Nagios XI
Download 15 min 11 min 1 min 1 min 10 min 16 min
Installation 15 min 52 min 34 min 25 min 60 min 22 min
Configuration 16 min 25 min 15 min 18 min 33 min 118 min
Discovery 16 min 35 min 35 min 35 min 35 min 41 min
Total Time to Monitor
62 minutes 123 minutes 85 minutes 70 minutes 138 minutes 197 minutes
0
50
100
150
200
250
CA UIM SW NPM SW BAP SW NTA SW SAM Nagios XI
Download Install Configure Discovery
Min
ute
s
Figure 1: Total Time to Monitor
TABLE 4: CA UIM v8.2 vs. SolarWinds
Topics Description CA UIM 8.2
SolarWinds NPM SolarWinds Bandwidth
Analyzer SolarWinds SAM
SolarWinds Netflow Traffic Analyzer
SCORE NOTES
SCORE NOTES SCORE NOTES SCORE NOTES SCORE NOTES
Installation
Total Download 5 12 min 4 11 min 5 1 min 4 10 min 4 1 min
Total Installation 5 12 min 4 52 min 3 34 min 4 60 min 4 25 min
Download Size 4 1.1 GB 4 5.4 GB 4 5.6 MB 5 640 MB 5 5.7 MB
Installation Difficulty 5 EASY; Wizard-
based 3 Multiple Steps 3 Multiple Steps 3 Multiple Steps 4
Multiple Steps but straight
forward
Installation errors 5 Zero 5 Zero 5 Zero 5 Zero 5 Zero
SUBTOTAL 24 20 20 21 22
Configuration
Total Time to Configure
5 15 min 4 25 Minutes 4 15 min 4 33 Min 4 18 Min
Ease of configuration 5 EASY; Wizard-
based 4
"Intelligent" alert
configuration 4
Highly Manual, time consuming
4 Manual, time
consuming 4
Manual, time consuming
SUBTOTAL 10 8 8 8 8
Platform Ease of Use
Overall Ease of Use of Platform
5 EASY 4 MEDIUM; Prior experience with IT mgt needed
4 Multiple screens with dashboards
4 MEDIUM; Prior
IT mgt experience
4 MEDIUM; Prior experience with IT mgt needed
UI & Navigation 5 Dynamic drill-
down 4
Drop-down menu driven
4 Drop-Down
menus 4
Drop-down menu driven
4 Drop-down
menu driven
Ease of Performance Reporting
5
EASY – dynamic access to data
through “clicking” on performance
metrics
3
MEDIUM – requires
navigating multiple
dashboards & reports
3
Data is there, overwhelming & difficult to scale
back
3 MEDIUM 3
MEDIUM – requires
navigating multiple
dashboards & reports
Visualize component performance
5 HIGH VISABILITY 5 HIGH VISBILITY 4 Can force view
into graphic format
5 HIGH VISBILITY 5 HIGH VISBILITY
SUBTOTAL 20 16 15 16 16
Performance
Overall app performance
5 HIGH
PERFORMANCE 5
HIGH PERFORMANCE
5 HIGH
PERFORMANCE 5
HIGH PERFORMANCE
5 HIGH
PERFORMANCE
Discovery of 100 network components
5 16 MIN 4 35 min; uses NPM Sonar
4 35 min; uses NPM
Sonar 4
35 min; uses NPM Sonar
4 35 min; uses NPM Sonar
Overall dashboard performance
5 HIGHEST
PERFORMANCE 5
HIGH PERFORMANCE
5 HIGH
PERFORMANCE 5
HIGH PERFORMANCE
5 HIGH
PERFORMANCE
SUBTOTAL 15 14 14 14 14
23 | P a g e
Diagnosis and Resolution
Performance issue identification
5 IMMEDIATE 4 Short Delay 4
Took 15 min before bandwidth performance was
detected
4 Short Delay 4
Delayed by 5 min before bandwidth
error detected
Problem Discovery Workflow
5 STRONG
2 PARTIAL in
COMPARISON 2
Does not provide recommended
remediation 2
PARTIAL in COMPARISON
2 PARTIAL in
COMPARISON
Bandwidth Performance Analysis
5
Analysis within most
dashboards – includes BA,
network latency, &
response time
3
Separate dashboard –
lacks network latency &
response times
3
Separate dashboard – lacks network latency &
response times
3
Separate dashboard –
lacks network latency &
response times
4
Separate dashboard – but includes
network latency
SUBTOTAL 15 9 9 9 10
Level of Unification
Level of Integration 5 Unified platform 4 Now part of
NPM dashboards
4 Now part of NPM
dashboards 4 4 separate
platforms but integrated
4
Requires navigation to view multiple performance
metrics
Reporting
OOTB vs. Customization
4
Deep configuration capability –
Dynamic dashboards
4 Requires
custom report writer
4 Requires custom
report writer 4 Requires
custom report writer
4 Customer
report writer
Quantity of Reports 5 HIGH NUMBER
OF REPORTS 4 Several pre-
canned reports 4
Canned reports available; lots of
data 4
Several pre-canned reports
3 Tabular reports
Dashboards 5 SINGLE
DASHBOARD 5
OTTB Dashboards
3
Is a separate dashboard and not integrated
into performance metrics
5 OTTB
Dashboards 3
Is a separate dashboard and not integrated
into performance
metrics
Custom Report Capability
4 Deep
Customization 5
Custom report writer
5 Custom report
writer 5
Custom report writer
5 Custom report
writer
Mobile Optimized Reporting
5 Highly
Optimized
2 Limited
Optimization 2
Limited Optimization
2 Limited
Optimization 2
Limited Optimization
SUBTOTAL 28 24 22 24 21
Overall Self-Guided Support
Guided Supported during install & configure
5 STRONG Wizards
3 Limited
guidance 3 Limited guidance 3
Limited guidance
3 Limited
guidance
Support Community
Support Community 4 Growing
community 5
Large & extremely
active 'Thwack' support
community
5
Large & extremely active 'Thwack'
support community
5
Large & extremely
active 'Thwack' support
community
5
Large & extremely
active 'Thwack' support
community
Overall Score Out of 125 pts 120
99 96 100 99
Percentage Grade
125 pts = 100% 97% 83% 80% 83% 83%
24 | P a g e
TABLE 5: CA UIM 8.2 vs. Nagios XI
Topics Description CA UIM 8.2 Nagios XI
SCORE NOTES
SCORE NOTES
Installation
Total Download time 5 15 min 5 16 min
Total Installation Time 5 15 min 5 22 Min
Download Size 4 1.1 GB 5 255 MB MSFT VM
Level of Installation Difficulty 5 EASY; Wizard-based 3 Multiple Steps
Total number of installation errors
5 Zero 5 Zero
Configuration
Total Time to Configure 5 16 min 2 118 Min
Ease of configuration 5 EASY; Wizard-based 3 Requires manual query development;
manual alert generation without guidance
Platform Ease of Use
Overall Ease of Use of Platform 5 EASY 4 Fairly easy to use
UI & Navigation 5 Dynamic drill-down 3 Drop-down menus with limited dynamic
drill-down
Ease of reporting performance of components
5 EASY 3 Requires a report writer, multiple steps, slow
report generation
Ability to visualize performance of components
5 HIGH VISABILITY 3 LIMITED VISIBILITY of all Components
Performance
Overall app performance 5 HIGH PERFORMANCE 4 RESPONSIVE
Discovery of 100 network & system components
5 15 MIN 4 41 min
Overall dashboard performance 5 Analysis within most dashboards –
includes bandwidth analysis, network latency, & response time
4 Limited dashboard but responsive
Diagnosis and resolution
Performance issue identification 5 IMMEDIATE 2 Slow to identify; Example took 10 min for
alerting
Guided workflow for problem discovery
5 STRONG 2 LIMITED
Bandwidth Utilization / Performance Analysis
5 2 Analysis of network devices only – no
applications; is a separate dashboard and not integrated into all performance metrics;
25 | P a g e
lacks network latency and response time analysis
Level of Unification
Level of Integration 5 Unified platform
2 Requires additional modules (Fusion, XI, &
Core)
Reporting
OOTB vs. Customization 4 Deep Configuration 2 Uses report writing engine for all reports;
requires multiple steps to generate a report; slow report gen
Quantity of Reports 5 HIGH NUMBER OF REPORTS 2 Uses report writing engine for all reports
Dashboards 5 SINGLE DASHBOARD 3 Limited DB to include System beck &
behavior
Custom Report Capability 4 Deep Customization 3 Limited custom reporting
Mobile Optimized Reporting 5 Highly Optimized 1 Extremely limited optimization
Overall Self-Guided Support
Guided Supported during install & configure
5 STRONG Wizards 3 Limited guidance
Support Community
Support Community 4 Growing community 5 Strong support community
Overall Score Out of 125 points 120 81
Percentage Score
125 pts = 100% 97% 65%
26 | P a g e
TABLE 6: Comparative Assessment of Response to Specific Scenarios Specific Scenario CA UIM SolarWinds NPM, NTA, SAM Nagios XI
Agent-installation Process Installed via a “robot”; Bulk robot installation via Automated Deployment Engine (ADE)
N/A - NPM is an agentless-only platform NCPA agent (Nagios Cross Platform Agent) via Nagios Monitoring Wizard; requires manual input of IP addresses
Configure basic system monitoring of CPU, disk and memory via agent approach.
Uses robot for CDM probe; Can set polling frequency & number of samples for each component
N/A - NPM is an agentless platform Part of auto-discovery process; Displays info within “Service Status” dashboard
Configure basic system monitoring of CPU, disk and memory via an agentless monitoring approach
Uses RSP probe via SSH, WMI, or telnet protocol; Can set alerts on various thresholds
Graphic-based “Gauge” displaying memory load & utilization with ability to set alert thresholds
N/A – is an Agent-Only platform
Diagnosis & resolution – bandwidth issue as traffic root cause analysis (15 users streaming various video feeds)
Bandwidth utilization is a native and inherent metric within most CA UIM reporting and dashboards for easy viewing and to consume as a root cause analytics metric. Also includes network latency and response time metrics. With CA UIM, was able to discover the impact of 15 users on the network simultaneously streaming video caused a network performance alarm due to bandwidth utilization. CA UIM pinpointed that 10 users were streaming video from YouTube while the other 5 users where downloading and then streaming movies on mobile devices. CA UIM pinpointed that the bandwidth being used from these video feeds was causing bandwidth utilization alarms from not only from excessive bandwidth utilization but impact to overall network latency and performance impact to business applications.
Must configure separate application (Bandwidth Analyzer Pack) to integrate with SolarWinds NPM. Bandwidth utilization is then its own separate dashboard and report and is NOT integrated into dynamic dashboards. Does NOT include network latency or response time metrics. With the provided scenario, SolarWinds alarmed to excessive bandwidth utilization but failed to identify all 15 users responsible for excessive bandwidth utilization and did not identify the offending programs contributing to the bandwidth utilization. SolarWinds also did not provide impact analysis to the network or which network assets or applications being affected from the excessive bandwidth utilization
Provides bandwidth analysis of network devices (switches, routers, physical servers) but NOT applications. Bandwidth analysis is also NOT part of general dashboards and reporting – is a separate dashboard and report that is not integrated into root cause analysis. Nagios XI does NOT include network latency or response time metrics. Nagios XI did not alarm on the excessive bandwidth utilization. The bandwidth utilization overage was reported in the separate bandwidth dashboard but did not alarm or provide additional analysis or metrics.
E-mail notification, escalation and custom alarm management
Can generate a "business" alarm upon receipt of other alarms. Completed via the CA UIM “NAS” and the Auto-operator
Free “Alert Central” module for central alert management; Includes desktop alert management
Basic email notification with limited alarm customization
Test a URL (via an HTTP test) and a ping test from a managed server
Requires URL Response Probe; Can test within Probe profile tab
Requires separate HTTP Monitor module for URL testing
Within dashboard; Has website URL monitoring wizard
Review the entire library of out of the box Unified Views/Dashboards that ship with the solution
40+ dashboard views; all highly graphical dashboards that are customizable – can use “portlets” (widgets) to create custom dashboards for specific users or teams.
Can use “widgets” to create custom dashboards; Comprehensive dashboard capabilities within NPM with 30 pre-configured dashboards
30 dashboards by specific category; Custom “dashlets” priced separately; Has central “service status” dashboard
27 | P a g e
TABLE 6: Comparative Assessment of Response to Specific Scenarios Specific Scenario CA UIM SolarWinds NPM, NTA, SAM Nagios XI
Proactive trending reports – OOTB correlation report
CA UIM offers “Trends report” to quickly troubleshoot root cause analysis. The Trend Report spots trends in network availability and performance parameters such as network interface utilization, error rates, connectivity failures, and latency.
Depending upon the offending issue, root cause analysis can require use of multiple different SW platforms; NPM, SAM, Virtualization manager, and/or Network Traffic Analyzer. SolarWinds was not able to provide an OOTB dashboard or report similar to the Trend Report that showed correlation of events.
No OOTM report for performance correlation trends to support rapid root cause analysis
Support for analysis of “Big data” monitoring
CA UIM now supports “big data” technologies such as Hadoop, Cassandra and MongoDB
No notable solution offered to meet this use case
No notable solution offered to meet this use case
Business Metric Monitoring - Non-IT Data Use Cases
Supports integration of IT & non-IT data together; Can view performance trends report alongside network and sales data to provide a single view of critical business services that affect the customer experience. For example, “How were sales impacted by server downtime?”
No notable solution or method to display non-IT alongside IT performance metrics for business metric correlation
No notable solution or method to display non-IT alongside IT performance metrics for business metric correlation
Bandwidth Analysis – ability to monitor bandwidth utilization, bandwidth performance, & bandwidth/network performance trends
Single unified platform with bandwidth utilization metrics native to most dynamic dashboards. Also includes bandwidth frame rate as well, which is import metric for video and unified communication.
Requires additional modules to monitor in-depth bandwidth utilization, only reporting on bandwidth utilization and not frame rate
Cannot report on bandwidth utilization
Overall ease of use, unified views, workflows, built in alarms, device views in a single interface
Single unified interface with one view of device status, alarms, and workflow execution
Multiple tabs & apps required; Customers may have NPM and SAM deployed along with other modules.
Multiple tabs and webpages required for different views of devices & device categories
Appendix A
Table 7: Calculations on Monthly Time Savings Between SolarWinds Suite and CA UIM
SolarWinds Suite CA UIM
Factor/Category Action/Requirements Average Monthly
Time Average
Monthly Time
SQL Database Maintenance
Annual database upgrades, patches (amortized on a monthly basis for four DBs in four SolarWinds products)
0.5 hours 0 hours
Monthly backups (for four DBs in 4 SolarWinds products)
0.5 hours 0.2 hours
Monthly database maintenance (database storage issues and growth 1 for four SolarWinds products and four DBs
0.5 hours 0 hours
Subtotal 1.5 Hours/month 0.2 Hours/month
Direct action – Ad hoc reporting & dashboards
Experienced average savings of 0.9 hours per day compared to SolarWinds with UI, navigation, dashboard creation, and ad hoc reporting compared to CA UIM due to single, unified UI (based upon 5 business days per week = 20 business days per month)
18 hours / month 5 hours / month
TOTAL MONTHLY Time 19.5 hours/month 5.2 hours/month
1) From SolarWinds “Best Practices for Managing the Orion Platform Database”, 2014, page 9: “The most common
issues with SolarWinds Orion databases are related to the database size”
29 | P a g e
A Special Report by Apprize360 Intelligence for CA Technologies, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Copyright 2015.
Apprize360 Intelligence, INC. www.apprize360.com San Francisco, CA [email protected]