AdventNet OpManager versus HP Openview Network Node Manager

First round.

Participants: AdventNet OpManager and HP Openview Network Node Manager

Hewlett Packard has no need of presentation. AdventNet it’s another USA company that produces software for system and network monitoring.

HP OpenView Network Node Manager (NNM for friends) can be installed under Solaris, Linux, Windows and of course under HP-UX. OpManager can be installed only under Linux and Windows and there’s no build for 64-bit processors.

For a network monitoring software, main part is discovery function. Discovery under OpManager is powerfull and easy. You need to specify IP range and subnet masks and system detects hosts. Detection is done pinging, querying snmp on specified ports and communities and checking if an IP has opened one or more predefined ports. All differents with NNM, it users two ways: command loadhost from shell or standard seefiles. Seedfiles are similar to OpManager discovery, they ping and query snmp a range of hosts. Loadhost is more easy, while it’s a command to load by hand a single host. Note that NNM also read arp cache from SNMP and load hosts in arp cache of loaded host. That can be usefull…but depends from you.

About Graphical User Interface…sure OpManager can be the leader. OpManager is manageable from a web interface. This interface is written in HTML so no needed of java. Java is used only for mib browser, and this is a good things. There’s a good way to view alarm, hosts, and function of reports is very powerful. NNM lacks on GUI. Web pages are managed from an applet java and works only Java 1.4 . If your have Java 1.5 you cannot access to the applet. By the way there’s not a good possibilities to manage NNM by web. It’s better to use NNM console, but your must have access to the server to export graphical display.

NNM, in fact, is not a standalone component. Usually it’s integrated with another product called “HP OpenView Operations”, a console browser to check and manage SNMP systems (managed throught NNM) and device agents. OpManager instead is a standalone product. AdvenNet does not give the possibilities to integrate it with others AdventNet products, except for ServiceDesk and Netflow Analyzers. Netflow Analzyer is a tool to analyze flow exported from Cisco devices managed throught OpManager. ServiceDesk is a comprehensive tool to manage tickets for alarms generated with OpManager.

Both can manage thresholds and generate events upon a thresold is reached. OpManager also can manage alarm escalation.

A thing need to be clear: usually NNM is a tool to collect snmp trap and queries hosts for get and archive data. All thresolds and alarms generated from NNM have to be parsed from a console software such as Openview Operations and in some case Tivolo Enterprise Console (Tivoli is a framework from IBM that also can be used for system monitoring).

Conclusions: NNM is ther right software for a big enterprise enviroment, but costs more than OpManager. OpManager is a right software for normal network and system monitoring. The great graph tool is very usefull. OpManager by the way is a very very good software and engine. The main problem in my opinion is that cannot be integrated with other software from the same software house, but I’m not talking about software for service desk or netflow, but software for application monitoring, databasemonitoring, and so on… Can be great if all AdventNet software can be grouped by a single management console, as Openview and Tivoli.

Also, OpManager can offer a great version called OpManager MSP Edition. MSP Edition permits to use many probes for customers with many datacenter of a particular network organization. A remote probe (that’s not supperted from NNM) can be better than an snmp proxy, that can only manage better network traffic, but depends from the querying server.