LiveAction LiveNX vs. Tivoli Monitoring (legacy)

From a packet tracing standpoint, it was easy to setup and analyze an issue we were having with eigrp errors between 2 data centers. Took a few minutes to stand up on both sides and compare the traffic to determine hellos weren't being sent. On the other spectrum, had it had the analytics of such products as Extrahop, it could have recognized and alerted us of an internal DNS attack we had.

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

• Network QOS Assessment, and recommendations, and point-and-click remediation
• Network L2/L3 Assessment, and recommendations, and point-and-click remediation
• Network Security Assessment, and recommendations, and point-and-click remediation

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• I use it primarily as a monitoring tool from a security standpoint, so one complaint is that the filter creation process takes a little time to learn.
• In the digital days of printing less, I do still need to print network diagrams for compliance documentation and some of the larger network diagrams documents do not print easily.
• I wish the network connection lines were easier to see. They are typically very light and you have to drill down to see them more clearly.

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

Can't really rate this, we never had to call support. The product wasn't complicated to setup and learn. We have a high level of network knowledge so the product was self-explanatory.

Incentivized

There is not any other product that does exactly what LiveAction does. Some come about halfway close, like scrutinizer by Plixer. However, there is a gap with that product as it doesn't give proper quality of service recommendations, or to update l2/l3 configs to head off problems. Plixer's scrutinizer product costs about the same. It was a no-brainer to pick LiveAction.

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

• Real time insight to network issues whether security related or not.
• Great reporting features for executives.

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