RE: [ActiveDir] Active Directory Monitoring with MOM

[Marcus Oh]

Title: Message

We’ve just started down the MOM path.  I agree with some of your statements regarding MOM’s clunky interface and AppManager’s more intuitive interface.  There’s a lot to be said about what NetIQ has done in terms of making script deployment relatively easy.   That’s about where it ends, however.  Speaking outside of functionality, in terms of a support organization, NetIQ consistently fails to make good grades.  We have had outages of our monitoring product for 4-5 days at greatest length.  With Microsoft, we at least know what we’re in for in terms of support.  There were times that we had 15-20 outstanding issues open with NetIQ… some going on for months!   We have some issues with some of the NetIQ reporting functionality (charting on the other hand is awesome).  For example, it seems to be a very common occurrence that data points are simply missing.  There doesn’t seem to be any agent intelligence in knowing that it delivered the data to the database correctly, even though it stores its information in a local Access db.  Also, in order to do any long term trending, you have to use the Analysis Center product – which keeps driving up the price of ownership.  An excellent example is the System Uptime report.  We could NEVER rely on that report being accurate enough to use for publishing.   As far as AD monitoring, we weren’t very impressed w/ what it offered out of the box.  Without buying yet another add-on (Active Directory Response Time), there didn’t seem to be any end-to-end type of checks for user experience or synthetic transactions to verify replication.   Database grooming also has issues.  There’s a table called Aggregate data where data does NOT seem to go away (had to get them to write a sql script to handle this function).  Since there’s no standard DTS packages or anything like that to setup a reporting database, if you decide to keep any amount of data for a reasonable length of time, the console takes a cups of coffee until it opens up.   We’ve used NetIQ for 2-3 years.  In the last 2-3 years, the product has not had many significant changes.  We’ve gone through 2 full version number changes and it seems to be the same thing.  I like AppManager for its vast functionality and ease of use… but am wholly displeased by their poor support, poor infrastructure, poor reporting… and did I mention poor support?  J   -m   -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Glenn Corbett Sent: Wednesday, June 11, 2003 7:13 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [ActiveDir] Active Directory Monitoring with MOM   yep, use MOM here for our AD infrastructure (2 Forests, 4 domains total).  I've deployed both NetIQ and MOM.   A repost of something similar asked on the exchange lists:   Essentially both products can perform the same levels of monitoring and reporting, however MOM requires a LOT more legwork to get the same result. The NetIQ interface as you said is more logical and easier to navigate, and it seems a lot more thought has been given to providing a clean interface for administrators. Setting up alerts etc for MOM for say a single server is MUCH more tedious than for NetIQ.  MOM's grouping of monitoring into a hierarchal structure based on attributes creates more confusion IMHO.  We have required some scripting to create custom attributes on servers just to enable some groups to be created (by pulling back these custom attributes), not necessary on NetIQ as it allow arbitrary grouping of servers (MOM does allow this as well, but its not as intuitive or efficient).  With NetIQ a simple drag/drop of a task or monitoring job onto the device in question is much easier and allows more targeted monitoring to occur.  Currently with MOM if I really want to perform specific monitoring of a server, I jump into perfmon and set up custom monitoring, rather than try and make MOM do it. Arbitrary grouping / monitoring of different core servers in a different way is where MOM really falls down IMHO.  With NetIQ, I can simply change the monitored jobs on each specific server, changing thresholds for each one, and even disabling some jobs if I feel like.  Attempting to do this with MOM is an exercise in frustration, since most settings are based on the monitoring groups which are attached to a group of servers based on a specific attribute (registry setting, name etc), not the server itself.  For example, we have 6 exchange servers.  If I want to monitor the gateway server differently, or set different thresholds (eg I'm not concerned if the outgoing SMTP queue length on the gateway gets about 50, but on a mailbox server I am), this is MUCH more difficult on MOM than it should be. Currently, I set the threshold lower for all exchange servers, and simply ignore the ones from the gateway where they are under *my* determined threshold.  Not pretty, and makes it more difficult for me to set up paging / sms interfaces for our after-hours support team, as they get a lot of unnecessary alerts. The scripting interface for both products is pretty-much on par. I am quite disappointed with the requirement to add-on packs for MOM to effectively monitor NT v4.0 servers, as this should be a core feature of the system (yes, I do realise MS want me to upgrade to 2k, 2003, but it isn't going to happen soon).   Add-on packs for both products are neither here nor there, as you require packs for application-specific monitoring of most applications (like Exchange, SQL), however NetIQ currently has wider choice for non-Microsoft applications (IBM, Oracle etc), and wider OS support. The NetIQ reporting / graphing is miles ahead of MOM, however with MOM you always can use Excel to provide customised reporting and graphing. In MOM's defence it is essentially a v1 product (even though it is based on other well-known product *grin*), so I am expecting big things from MOM 2004.   As for costs, my undertsanding that MOM is fairly expensive, but NetIQ is slightly higher (all our MS licensing is covered under our select / enterprise agreement).   As for hardware requirements, we have a quad processor Xeon server with 2gb RAM providing the database backend, and a dual processor Xeon with 1gb RAM providing the front end services (Compaq/HP Proliant 570, and 530 respectively).    We have had issues with the size of the MOM database, and have had to ramp back event log collection due to the database overflowing (IIRC MOM has a 30gb limit on the database in the current version).   Overall, both products can perform the same task, however I feel NetIQ currently has the upper hand between the two.  Next version of MOM should be interesting to see. Glenn ----- Original Message ----- From: Chris Flesher To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, June 12, 2003 3:13 AM Subject: [ActiveDir] Active Directory Monitoring with MOM   I'm wondering if anyone uses Microsoft Operations Manager to monitor their AD infrastructure? If not, what other product(s) are used, and how do you feel about them? What are the relative costs for the product?   Chris Flesher