I use OpenView 4 now have for several years (since Openview 3). It was the best thing going for a while anyway. The best/worst thing about OpenView is using vendor equipment management modules that only work with openview. Or HP LanProbes and such. These tend to be huge worksavers, if you can somehow accomodate the security limitations (or use oob sets, etc) At least, they used to be. Now, I'm not so sure. Instead of using snmp to actually change configuration, I am now mostly using it to monitor what's going on, and react to snmp traps when they are sent. Frankly, I don't think snmp monitoring is all that hard. OpenView is still incredibly expensive, and very difficult to buy. I think the freeware alternatives are just as good, and possibly better in some cases. But it depends though on what you are going to do. I'd check into mrtg and scotty first, and then look at OpenView. They also work on freebsd... --Dean At 02:52 PM 12/16/1998 -0600, Tim Salo wrote:

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Date: Tue, 15 Dec 1998 16:48:06 -0800 (PST) From: Derek Balling <dredd@megacity.org> To: nanog@merit.edu Subject: System and Network Monitoring

OK, I'm looking for "real world" data and not sales/marketing hype.

I'm looking for a package to do network and system monitoring. It's a heterogenous environment consisting of all manner of routers, at least 700 servers (Mostly FreeBSD, but also Solaris and Network Appliance boxen). [...]

I would be interested to hear about your comparison of a commercial package such as HP OpenView with free alternatives.

My inclination is towards a commercial package. I even suspect that it would be less expensive in the long run, plus it seems likely to free up your technical talent for revenue-producing activities.

-tjs

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