HP Openview

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1

NANOG:

I am curious if anyone has been working with HP Openview as an NMS. I've
been looking at it (Specifically the service call portion) and so far,
have not been impressed - I'm just not seeing the feature set I would
expect. Am I just being stubborn and not seeing the advantages of this?

From my understanding the full HP Openview is in beta, but I'm not sure.

I've done some researching on HP's website, and I can't seem to really
find any relevant data. One of the large sticking points is I am trying
to find a *nix based client, specifically one I can get working on
Solaris, and so far, I'm having a difficut time tracking one down.

Am I wasteing my time with HP Openview? If you are using it, are you
pleased? Should I accept fate and life and eat chicken for supper
tonight?

Any advise and suggestions are welcomed.

-Eric

2

Might want to take a peek at OpenNMS...http://www.opennms.org I'm not
sure it'll be everything you dream of, but hey it's a hell of a lot
cheaper...

John

3

What are you trying to accomplish? Many Internet organizations use
a combination of opensource and commercial tools (HPOV being the most
popular of the commercial tools) to help manage their networks.

The CAIDA tool taxonomy attempts to identify some of the tools that
real people use for network management (it's a good place to start):
http://www.caida.org/tools/taxonomy/

It is easy to waste time with any NMS package (commercial or opensource),
so be careful of what you pay for, who you hire to manage these
resources, and how you go about working on NMS-related projects.

-dre

4

Also take a look at JFFNMS - http://jffnms.sourceforge.net/
It might be worth letting us know what your management requirements
are before dismissing OpenView :wink:

ta,
Matt.

5

NANOG:

I am curious if anyone has been working with HP Openview as an NMS. I've
been looking at it (Specifically the service call portion) and so far,
have not been impressed - I'm just not seeing the feature set I would
expect. Am I just being stubborn and not seeing the advantages of this?
From my understanding the full HP Openview is in beta, but I'm not sure.

I'm not familiar with service call, but we're using Openview NNM as more
of a network status/monitoring system. So keep that in mind when you read
my comments..

I've done some researching on HP's website, and I can't seem to really
find any relevant data. One of the large sticking points is I am trying
to find a *nix based client, specifically one I can get working on
Solaris, and so far, I'm having a difficut time tracking one down.

Am I wasteing my time with HP Openview?

Yes.

If you are using it, are you pleased?

No. It's not worth the investment. Basically, it provides a graphical
-yippie- display of your network status. It also provides other things,
but nothing that couldn't be done via gpl'd software like netsaint and
mrtg. The only real benefit I see from openview is it's device discovery
part.. That way I don't have to rely on staff to remember to add a device
to be monitored, instead, I simply dump the openview database and rebuild
my netsaint config. Also, I was one of the few people to dive into NNM
2.6 (which we're still running, if it ain't broke, don't upgrade) on
solaris, and had so many problems initially because of our large network
(120,000 objects.. imagine netmon taking 3 hours before it actually
started checking devices.. and imagine a patch for netmon not coming out
for 2 months and an HP tech support person trying to come up with
workarounds to keep me happy).

Bottom line, you'd probably be better off taking the time to implement
some GPL software (netsaint, mrtg, opennms, etc) rather than spending your
time fighting with Openview. Unless you'd rather be known as the "Openview
Administrator" and be relegated to spending a majority of your time
babysitting a beast of a program and shelling out thousands of dollars per
year for support and software upgrades.

Should I accept fate and life and eat chicken for supper
tonight?

Any advise and suggestions are welcomed.

Just my $0.02.

-B