HPE Systems Insight Manager (SIM) vs. Tivoli Monitoring (legacy)

This software is suited for a smaller organization with a small datacenter that uses mainly HP hardware. Once the environment gets larger it would pay to move to some of their paid for products

Incentivized

If you are looking for a software that looks decent but is not something you truly rely on, this is it. I have had bad experiences with IBM Tivoli Monitoring reporting on system errors that were not evident on the systems themselves at all. There is a lot of specific alerting you can set up which is nice.

Incentivized

• HP Systems Insight Manager is very good at scanning for devices and adding them for monitoring is almost effortless.
• HP Systems Insight Manager is very good at detecting most HP hardware and integrating with local management software.

Incentivized

• The GUI is easy to read.
• The software is fairly easy to configure.
• Almost real-time.

Incentivized

• I think some of the areas that HP Systems Insight Manager can improve is non HP hardware.
• This software also sometimes struggles handling larger environments.
• This software also has issues managing environments that aren't set up perfectly.

Incentivized

• The software is not reliable at all.
• Reports errors that are false-negatives.
• Hard to configure alarms/alerts.
• Bulky installation (takes up quite a bit of space).

Incentivized

For basic functions it's very easy to set up and use. However, for more advanced functions it takes a lot of time to figure out its quirks

Incentivized

It's good for small organizations that use HP branded equipment

Incentivized

Some of the other products I use for system management are HP SiteScope and SolarWinds Orion NPM and APM. SiteScope is another good HP product but it isn't very cost effective to use for general system management. It's good for performing complex alerting and monitoring. SolarWinds makes a great product but it is better geared for gathering statistics and performance data real-time and historically. Again the cost of this product makes it ineffective for general system monitoring.

Incentivized

We selected IBM Tivoli Monitoring as a bundle deal, other than that I would have probably gone with another vendor. We use Brocade Network Advisor for our SAN also which I would suggest to anyone over this software. The software has not been that reliable for me since we started using it.

Incentivized

• Since this software is free if you buy HP hardware the cost is nothing which is nice for cash strapped businesses.
• This software has a somewhat difficult time handling large environments where systems are not configured perfectly for this software.
• I would always recommend having multiples of this software installed for redundancy because generally unless it and the environment is properly configured it can require maintenance.

Incentivized

• I would not purchase this again.
• Other software monitoring tools have been more reliable and easier to manage.
• Difficult to manage, if you patch the server the software is installed on and have to reboot it, IBM Tivoli Monitoring does not come up clean.

Incentivized