[Xymon] experience with BMC Patrol

[zGreenfelder]

On Thu, Jan 10, 2013 at 12:46 PM, Larry Barber <lebarber at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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?
>

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.


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