experience with BMC Patrol 🔗 link

My organization is trying to replace Xymon with BMC Patrol (I suspect its
politics more than any dissatisfaction with Xymon). I don't have any
experience with this product, but if it is like other BMC products that I'm
familiar with calling it a piece of junk would be giving it too much
credit. Does anybody here have any experience with this product. What are
it's strong points? Weak points?

Thanks,
Larry Barber

On Thu, Jan 10, 2013 at 12:46 PM, Larry Barber <user-6ef9c2864140@xymon.invalid> wrote:

my experience with BMC is several years old (>10 at this point), so
much of this may no longer be accurate, but what I recall:

plus sides:
commercial support.   people always feel better having someone to
sue/pick up the phone and yell at, I guess.
consistent:  if you monitor X, Y, Z aparameters on an A device,
they'll also be there for a B device and the reporting about such
things will be very similar.
integrations: you can pay money and get BMC to tie into a widget woogle.

downsides beyond the obvious:
integrations are NOT simple: if you don't want to pay the cash and you
have an odd ball sort of widget to connect, BMC could be difficult to
deal with.
impact: I've seen crappy, old hardware take a >15 % resource hit when
running BMC client.

one of the things I always hated most about BMC was never being quite
sure what and how it was gathering.   e.g. is it running ps -ef?  is
it using something else to look at the process table?  it says memory
is 94% free, all the other tools I use say it's 15% free and manager X
demands to know why there's a delta.

I'd fight against it as best I could; if feasible I'd say set up a lab
environment with side by side monitors $opensource (since you're
asking on this list, I'd assume xymon) and bmc on a demo license, then
let people look at them side by side, then throw in the price tag and
mention what sorts of machine or software upgrades you could do in
other places for what  BMC is going to cost  (and make sure the
server/storage costs are included in that price tag... the demands of
the monitor are likely to be nontrivial)

hope this is of some use.


-- 
Even the Magic 8 ball has an opinion on email clients: Outlook not so good.

Hi

In my company, previously, we were using BMC Patrol.

It costs lot of licence money and for any new specific check, you have to pay.

The main reason we migrate to xymon :

- licence very expensive,
- only basic metric (cpu, mem, disk). you have to pay for specific checks (oracle, sql server, whatever etc). you can t develop your own check :(
- no url check (it was 10 years ago, maybe it changed) with content search.
- no network/firewall/storage monitoring (maybe we didn t pay for it).
- difficult to integrate with 3rd party (CMDB, Ticketing tool).

i remember the BMC console was on a solaris, and we had to launch X to see it. 
Meaning there were no Web GUI to see the device and alerts... . it was so slow when you got more than 100 devices. (we got now > 11 000 monitored devices by Xymon, i don t want to imagine how it could be with Patrol).

the main reason to use xymon is it is flexible, one single tool to monitor everything (system/network/firewall/storage/esx/application/url/backup) and you can easily develop around it to match your business needs.

I hope for BMC that after 10 years it changed .... maybe you should request a demo to have a good opinion.

if you want to see screenshot: http://support.sas.com/rnd/emi/BMCPatrol/SASPatrolMeta.html


Cheers
NIco

Le 10 janv. 2013 à 18:46, Larry Barber <user-6ef9c2864140@xymon.invalid> a écrit :

And just so you do not miss it, from the same URL Nico posted:

http://support.sas.com/rnd/emi/Xymon/index.html

with a nice write up of Xymon's features.


~David

-----Original Message-----
From: xymon-bounces at xymon.com [mailto:xymon-bounces at xymon.com] On
Behalf Of Nico
Sent: Thursday, January 10, 2013 16:24
To: Larry Barber
Cc: xymon at xymon.com
Subject: Re: [Xymon] experience with BMC Patrol