Comparing Infrastructure Management Vendors Time to Monitor

Transcription

1 Comparing Infrastructure Management Vendors Time to Monitor Comparison of CA Unified Infrastructure Management Version (CA UIM v8.5.1), SolarWinds SAM, and Nagios XI Apprize360 Intelligence, LLC March 2017 A Special Report Commissioned for CA Technologies, Inc.

2 Table of Contents Executive Summary... 3 Study Methodology... 4 CA UIM: What s New in v8.5.1?... 4 CA UIM v8.5.1 Configuration and Installation... 6 Comparative Benchmark Results... 7 CA UIM v8.5.1 vs. SolarWinds SAM... 7 CA UIM v8.5.1 vs. Nagios XI... 7 Summary and Conclusions... 9 Appendix A: Calculations. 11 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 and should not be construed as presenting statements of fact. The opinions expressed herein are subject to change without notice.

3 Executive Summary CA Unified Infrastructure Management Version (CA UIM) is a single IT monitoring that offers deep monitoring functionality and unified analytics and architecture. The advances of CA UIM also enable rapid time to value by facilitating infrastructure monitoring and actionable data collection extremely quickly. Multiple IT monitoring platforms are available on the market today to support the various needs of small, medium-sized, and large enterprises, as well as managed service providers (MSPs). To better understand the time-to-value efficiencies that CA UIM provides, Apprize360 Intelligence, LLC (Apprize360) studied and compared the following IT monitoring products: 1. CA Unified Infrastructure Management Version (CA UIM) 2. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor (SAM) 3. Nagios XI The time to setup, configure and deploy monitoring ( Time to Monitor ) is critical for today s DevOps environments. Infrastructure monitoring tools that provide rapid configuration, deployment, and monitoring across increasingly hybrid infrastructures can be a strategic advantage through faster time to market and staff productivity. For managed service providers, speed to monitoring can contribute to a competitive advantage. This comparative analysis focuses on the speed to which vendor platforms enable active infrastructure monitoring ( time to monitor ). Apprize360 studied the speed to which the three platforms began infrastructure monitoring and providing useful and actionable insights via analytics embedded in real-time dashboards and reports. Apprize360 found that CA UIM was the fastest platform to enable infrastructure monitoring, as well as the collection of data to create actionable insights. With CA UIM, we were able to download, install, configure, and begin network monitoring for a total of 100 operating systems in 20 minutes. This included receiving reports and dashboards with Key Study Findings The time it takes to setup accurate infrastructure monitoring is critical in today s fast paced IT environments. In this study, we reviewed CA UIM, Solarwinds SAM (& Supporting products) and Nagios XI (open source tool) with respect to the total time required to download, install, configure, and begin to monitor, including the time required to begin returning analytics (total time to monitor). Based on this study, CA UIM had the fastest time to monitor. CA UIM was ~3X faster than SolarWinds SAM and ~9X faster than Nagios XI. CA UIM also provides capabilities that are matched by multiple Solarwinds products/modules. Even comparing with SAM only, CA UIM was the fastest time to monitor. Automatic application infrastructure discovery is a new capability that automatically discovers, groups, and monitors the applications running on devices in the environment. CA UIM also included best practices monitoring templates and out of the box dashboards, which further increased the speed of deployment and monitoring. Another CA UIM differentiator is its out-of-the-box advanced analytics, including contextual log analysis that proactively identifies potential performance issues and provides business-centric views. actionable data. In comparison, the same process averaged 72 minutes with SolarWinds SAM and almost 3 hours total with Nagios XI.

4 Study Methodology Apprize360 downloaded fully functional trial versions of each of the IT monitoring products from CA Technologies, 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 T630 Server with an Intel Xeon E Ghz processor and 64TB of disk space. For CA UIM v8.5.1 and SolarWinds SAM, the operating system used was Microsoft Server 2012R2. 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 80 physical operating systems and 20 virtual operating systems with workloads for databases, several web servers, virtual machines, and . The trial versions of the platforms were downloaded using a T1 connection that averaged an internet speed of MBPS. Two enterprise applications, SAP Ariba and Microsoft Office Suite, were installed on the infrastructure for discovery. CA Unified Infrastructure Management (CA UIM) What s New in v8.5.1? CA Technologies has made significant improvements and enhancements to CA Unified Infrastructure Management Version 8.5.1, primarily in the following areas: 1. Faster and easier platform configuration 2. New contextual log analytics 3. Out-of-the-box dashboards 4. Automatic application infrastructure discovery 5. Expanded number of operating templates 1) Faster and Easier Platform Configuration CA Technologies has invested significantly in the overall deployment experience of CA UIM v The platform uses a self-extraction application from Flexera Software s InstallAnywhere, making the guided download experience easy and quick. This includes a streamlined user-flow with fewer screens and mouse clicks, which provides a simplified installation experience. The configuration process for CA UIM is one the most impressive aspects of the new version. While there is immediate access to on-screen videos and articles, these are not necessarily needed as CA Technologies has included bulk configuration capabilities with defaults set based upon best practices and more than 20 years of infrastructure monitoring experience. This ensures that the configuration process runs extremely quickly and is completed with appropriate settings.

5 2) New Contextual Log Analytics CA UIM now provides contextual log analysis and monitoring that enables proactive issue resolution. The solution automatically aggregates, normalizes and displays log data from multiple sources. By delivering log analytics that are tightly integrated with infrastructure performance management, staff members can benefit from the ability to do immediate analysis, within the context of their specific roles and activities. The solution also provides contextual event alarms that map to infrastructure performance alerts. 3) Out-of-the-Box Analytics and Dashboards: CA Business Intelligence (CABI) CA Business Intelligence (CABI) provides advanced, out-of-the-box intelligence in summary dashboards that are automatically populated. Users can quickly view these dashboards, which reflect server health according to the status of open alarms, probes by alarms, top devices by alarm, device by role, and top groups by alarm. The dashboards are fully configurable, allowing each panel to be moved and additional summary panels to be added or removed. The ability to configure these dashboards for the specific needs of the user and/or organization, all without scripting or coding, is simply impressive. In addition to the ability to configure dashboards by filtering specific needs, CA UIM also offers a library of hundreds of out-of-the-box dashboard templates and reports that do not require any filtering or editing. A user can simply search for a topic or describe what they want to display and then select the dashboard at the click of a button. CABI dashboards are set to best-practice default options and include summary dashboards for AWS, Azure, Docker, SAP, Nutanix, and OpenStack, as well. 4) Automatic Application Infrastructure Discovery CA introduces Automatic Application Infrastructure Discovery and Monitoring in this version, which enhances existing CA UIM MCS (monitoring configuration service) capabilities by automatically detecting the applications running on a server and deploying probes and monitoring configurations. Configurations are pre-set with best-practice settings to enable

6 fast, effective infrastructure monitoring. This version supports the automatic monitoring of running systems Apache, Oracle, MySQL, Microsoft SQLServer, and Microsoft IIS. Users also have the ability to customize for their custom applications. 5) Expanded Number of Operating Templates CA has added several new MCS templates with additional probe support for the following: AWS, Docker, OpenStack, Nutanix, Active Directory, Exchange, LDAP, IIS, net_connect, SharePoint, and RSP. CA UIM v Configuration and Installation The installation process for CA Unified Infrastructure Management Version is fundamentally different from that of Nagios XI and SolarWinds SAM. CA Technologies has made sure that everything from product download to installation and configuration is seamless and easy to complete. This includes access to on-screen tutorial videos and articles to assist with the installation process, as well as pre-configured best-practice defaults for many of the monitoring features. CA UIM v8.5.1 uses the Flexera InstallAnywhere application. Both Nagios XI and SolarWinds SAM 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 of all the products assessed during this study. After initial installation, the configuration of CA UIM v8.5.1 continues to be straightforward. Of the three vendor platforms reviewed, CA UIM was by far the easiest to configure and begin using for network monitoring. The out-of-the-box automated discovery process took four minutes to identify and log all 100 operating systems. After the automated discovery process was completed, CA UIM immediately began monitoring infrastructure services, applications, and individual performance issues and began reporting actionable data and insights. The CA UIM v8.5.1 Unified Service Manager (USM) dashboard gives the user a complete view of the entire IT environment being monitored. This supports dynamic drill-down into specific areas of concern right from the launch of this dashboard. Within the dashboard, users can also identify device performance issues by geography, measure overall performance, and review the latest alarms. New CABI dashboards are complimentary and provide a very intuitive, easy mechanism for issue identification and resolution Comparative Benchmark Results Apprize360 s assessment discovered several differences in the installation and configuration processes of the vendor platforms evaluated. Overall, CA Unified Infrastructure Management Version led the group regarding ease of installation and configuration. It also had the fastest time to achieving actionable data and analytics. The full quantitative results of this study can be found in Appendix A beginning on page 10.

7 CA UIM vs. SolarWinds SAM In addition to SolarWinds SAM, usually multiple products are required achieve the same level of functionality as CA UIM in double the time to begin monitoring and reporting data. SolarWinds SAM requires users to download a ZIP file containing an auto-extractable application that must then be manually activated. Unlike the guidance provided by CA UIM v8.5.1, SolarWinds SAM s wizard offers limited guidance to support the user through the installation process. In addition, several different steps were required to complete the installation of SolarWinds SAM. CA UIM v8.5.1 took 18 minutes to download, install, configure, and discover 100 devices. With CA UIM v8.5.1, data collection and analysis is almost immediate. In just two more minutes, dashboards were populated for the infrastructure, the 100 operating systems, and two enterprise applications. Apprize360 refers to the time from download to the production of analytics as total time to monitoring. For CA UIM v8.5.1, the total time to monitor metric was consistently 20 minutes. We discovered that Solarwinds SAM required more than double that time to complete the processes, from installation to network monitoring. With SolarWinds SAM, the total time to monitor was 72 minutes. Table 1: CA UIM v8.5.1 vs. SolarWinds SAM CA UIM v8.5.1 SolarWinds SAM Download 5 mins 2 mins Installation 4 mins 15 mins Configuration 5 mins 20 mins Discovery 4 mins 20 mins Analytics 2 mins 15 mins Total Time to Monitor 20 minutes 72 minutes A significant contributor to the excessive time required for SolarWinds SAM configuration was that its discovery wizard requires the user to enter SNMP credentials and then proceeds to discover VMware and Windows devices before scoping the network through an IP address range. This step can take anywhere from 10 to 15 minutes depending on the size and structure of the network. CA UIM v8.5.1 vs. Nagios XI New capabilities, such as automated application infrastructure discovery and configuration, allow much more rapid time to monitoring. CA UIM took 20 minutes versus SolarWinds 72 minutes Nagios XI is an open-source IT monitoring product that runs on Linux servers. Similar to SolarWinds SAM, 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-server basis. License pricing is determined by the number of hosts

8 (nodes) that the user intends to monitor. There are no restrictions on the number of servers that can be monitored with Nagios XI. While Nagios XI is a relatively inexpensive monitoring solution, an experienced IT administrator may be needed to ensure its successful deployment and on-going management. Downloading Nagios XI is a multi-step process that lacks the guidance offered by CA UIM v When compared with Nagios, CA UIM took 20 minutes versus Nagios 156 minutes. CA UIM has a significant advantage in terms of time to value when compared with open source tools After installation, the configuration process is highly technical, requiring the manual development of discovery queries and manual alert generation without providing on-screen guidance. The process of downloading, installing, configuring, and discovering 100 devices with Nagios XI took more than two hours, and the total time to monitoring was more than two and a half hours (156 minutes). Table 2: CA UIM v8.5.1 vs. Nagios XI CA UIM v8.5.1 Nagios XI Download 5 mins 9 mins Installation 4 mins 22 mins Configuration 5 mins 80 mins Discovery 4 mins 30 mins Analytics 2 mins 15 mins Total Time to Monitor 20 minutes 156 minutes Summary and Conclusions CA UIM V8.5.1 is an easy-to-use and quick-to-deploy IT monitoring solution. Of the three solutions assessed, the installation and configuration process for CA UIM V was the easiest, had the shortest time to value through its quick enabling of infrastructure monitoring, and had the fastest time to reporting data analytics. There are several factors that make CA UIM unique: 1) CA UIM monitoring functionality is hosted in a single platform. To create an equivalent monitoring strategy, a user would be required to deploy multiple SolarWinds products in addition to Solarwinds SAM products to achieve the functionality offered by a single use of CA UIM v8.5.1 which also supports comprehensive coverage, including monitoring cloud services, databases, storage, and applications in a single platform. 2) CA UIM provides an automated, guided installation and configuration process. This ensures the deployment process is quick and intuitive, allowing for correct decisions to be made during initial configuration. In addition, probe configurations that are set to default bestpractice settings not only quicken the configuration process but also ensure monitoring settings are established with the highest quality and most effective variables.

9 3) CA UIM had the fastest time to monitor (time from download, through configuration, to device monitoring with analytics) at 20 minutes. The closest alternative was SolarWinds SAM at 72 minutes, which is more than thrice as long as CA UIM time 4) CA UIM discovery process took the least time to identify devices and applications and begin active device monitoring and analytics. CA UIM began calculating important performance metrics such as error condition diagnosis, root cause analysis, and bandwidth utilization immediately upon discovery. CA UIM latest feature automatic application infrastructure discovery and configuration contributed to the speed of discovery and analytics. 5) CA UIM provided the fastest time to value. CA UIM has the fastest time to analytics, allowing administrators to rapidly begin monitoring and conducting root cause analysis within their network environments. 6) CA UIM includes automated application discovery and configuration. This new feature supports the automatic discovery and mapping of application infrastructure. It also automatically suggests a template to be deployed for each application. This is a massive step forward for CA UIM enterprise and managed service providers customers. Figure 1: Total Time to Monitor Minutes Nagios XI Solarwinds SAM CA UIM 0 Download Installation Configuration Discovery Analytics Table 3: Total Time to Monitor CA UIM v8.5.1 SolarWinds SAM Nagios XI Download 5 mins 2 mins 9 mins Installation 4 mins 15 mins 22 mins Configuration 5 mins 20 mins 80 mins Discovery 4 mins 20 mins 30 mins Analytics 2 mins 15 mins 15 mins Total Time to Monitor 20 minutes 72 minutes 156 minutes

10 APPENDIX A Table 4: CA UIM v8.5.1 vs. SolarWinds SAM Topics Description CA UIM v8.5.1 SolarWinds SAM SCORE NOTES SCORE NOTES Total Download 5 5 mins 4 9 mins Total Installation 5 4 mins 4 22 mins Installation Installation Difficulty 5 EASY; Wizard-based 3 MEDIUM; Multiple steps Installation Errors Total Time to Install 5 9 mins 3 31 mins Configuration Discovery Total Time to Monitor Reporting and Analytics SUBTOTAL 25 pts 19 pts Ease of Configuration 5 EASY; Wizard-based with preconfigured best practices Total Time to Configure 5 EASY - 5 mins 3 3 MEDIUM; Manual, time consuming = 80 min MEDIUM; Prior IT mgt experience required; limited pre-set configurations SUBTOTAL 10 pts 6 pts Discovery of 100 OS, Workloads & mins 3 20 mins Enterprise Applications Automated App Automated app discovery 5 Discovery feature 0 No automated app discovery SUBTOTAL 10 pts 3 pts Time to Monitor 5 20 mins 3 72 mins Pre-configured Monitoring Settings 5 Supports best practice settings that are pre-configured 1 Limited pre-configured monitoring settings SUBTOTAL 10 pts 4 pts Quantity & Quality of Reports 5 Over 100+ reporting options 4 Several pre-canned reports Dashboards 5 Single management portal for dashboarding 4 OTTB dashboards Custom Report Supports configuration of 3 Capability reports 5 Custom report writer OOTM Analytics 5 Pre-configured summary and detailed dashboards & metrics 3 Limited OOTB metrics SUBTOTAL 18 pts 16 pts Overall Score 73 pts 48 pts Percentage Grade 75 pts = 100% 97% 64%

11 Table 5: CA UIM v8.5.1 vs. Nagios XI Topics Description CA UIM v8.5.1 Nagios XI SCORE NOTES SCORE NOTES Total Download 5 5 mins 4 9 mins Total Installation 5 4 mins 4 22 mins Installation Installation Difficulty 5 EASY; Wizard-based 3 MEDIUM; Multiple steps Installation errors Total Time to Install 5 9 mins 3 31 mins Configuration Discovery Total Time to Monitor Reporting and Analytics SUBTOTAL 25 pts 19 pts Ease of configuration 5 EASY; Wizard-based with preconfigured best practices Total time to configure 5 EASY - 5 mins 3 3 MEDIUM; Manual, time consuming = 80 mins MEDIUM; Prior IT mgt experience; limited pre-set configurations SUBTOTAL 10 pts 6 pts Discovery of 100 OS, Workloads & mins 3 30 mins Enterprise Applications Automated App Automated app discovery 5 Discovery feature 0 No automated app discovery SUBTOTAL 10 pts 3 pts Time to monitor 5 20 mins mins Pre-configured monitoring settings 4 1 Limited pre-configured monitoring settings SUBTOTAL 9 pts 3 pts Quantity of Reports 5 HIGH NUMBER OF REPORTS 4 Several pre-canned reports Dashboards 5 Single management portal for dashboarding 4 OTTB dashboards Custom Report Capability 4 Deep customization 5 Custom report writer OOTM Analytics 5 Pre-configured summary and detailed dashboards & metrics 3 Limited OOTB metrics SUBTOTAL 19 pts 16 pts Overall Score 73 pts 47 pts Percentage Grade 75 pts = 100% 97% 63%

12 A Special Report by Apprize360 Intelligence for CA Technologies, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Copyright Apprize360 Intelligence, INC. San Francisco, CA