Features

ViewITpro vs. Network Management “Tools”

ViewITpro Advantages

ViewITpro
Vs. Tools

ViewITpro Features	Typical Tool Approach / Description	ViewITpro Benefit
Business process monitoring across multiple platforms.	Multiple tools needed with much human involvement or extensive programming to meet requirements.	ViewITpro seamlessly monitors business processes spanning across multiple platforms thus freeing up staff and reducing complexity..
Intelligent alarming	Low-end tools provide simplistic threshold-crossed-then-alarm mechanisms, typically called Arm/Re-Arm. An alarm event will be generated each time a threshold is crossed then re-arms when the condition clears. Fluctuating conditions (most IT metrics) cause numerous false-positives and unnecessary alerts with these systems, ultimately leading to wasted time, energy, and eventually administrators ignoring alarms.	Provides intelligent alarm engine that dramatically reduces false-positives and assures only bona-fide events create pages/alerts, saving time and money.
Alarm correlation	Typically not included. Simply monitoring "a bunch of individual items." If a router goes down, then you will receive alarms for every interface and every device and component behind the router, generating hundreds of useless events.	ViewITpro provides alarm compression and advanced alarm correlation to consolidate alarms, reduce work, and provide immediate root-cause-diagnosis.
Root cause analysis and diagnosis	Same as above. You may receive hundreds of individual alarms without the ability to determine root cause. Particularly acute when attempting to determine Performance problems.	ViewITpro provides both Root Cause Diagnosis (RCD) and Anomaly Analysis and Reporting (AAR) to show root causes of outages as well as pinpoint performance bottlenecks and anomalies.
Multi-user web interface	Typically, tools are "single user" in nature and don’t allow for collaboration among IT support teams. There’s no concept of "who has the ball" and problem ownership. No one knows if someone is working on a problem or has assigned it to a colleague. Most are configured as "Monitor This, If Broken, Page X."	ViewITpro is a multi-user web-based system with assignable roles and permissions. ViewITpro provides alarm-handling, escalation, knowledge capture, and logging. ViewITpro can capture and store process and repair information to reduce work and improve collaboration.
Workflows	Once an alarm is sent, there’s no concept of workflow. An engineer gets a page, now what?	ViewITpro provides time-saving alarm handling and ticketing workflow so an engineer can quickly isolate the problem and take immediate action using a single tool. ViewITpro incorporates remote access and control tools within the alarm screens for immediate access.
True SNMP polling	Many tools provide the "ability" to monitor SNMP Object Identifiers (OIDs). The dirty little secret is that OIDs themselves don’t provide valuable information, they are merely counters. They must be assembled and have proper math performed to provide a useful statistic, such as "Bandwidth Utilization."	ViewITpro is a full featured NMS that provides standard SNMP polling and reporting for important statistics out of the box.
True SNMP Trap handling and conversion	SNMP trap handling is another feature most often distorted by tool vendors. Most SNMP traps are cryptic, unreadable, and therefore useless messages in their raw form.	ViewITpro accepts SNMP "traps" but converts them into meaningful events in plain text such as "Server1 PowerSupply 1 FAILED."
Integrated Security Monitoring	Tools may provide some limited security monitoring but leave many security elements unmonitored.	ViewITpro provides comprehensive network and host-based IDS, security, firewall, antivirus, and syslog monitoring.
Advanced fault management via syslog and event log monitoring	If a tool does provide syslog and/or eventlog monitoring capability, it is usually limited and unintelligent, causing numerous false positives, redundant events, and unfiltered data. Most tools provide simple pattern matching, meaning no ability to specify case sensitivity, etc. Events are Stored as RAW text in a Text Log that can be displayed	ViewITpro inspects logs in real time and detects best-practices based patterns as well as generic errors to provide advanced proactive warning of problems. ViewITpro has powerful universal and specific application log file monitoring (such as Oracle) capability using regular expression pattern matching. It also has the ability to read the file from "last read" instead of starting at the beginning each time, etc. Event logs are stored and decoded into their field components in the ViewITpro DB, enabling detailed event breakdown and analysis. For example, syslogs are deciphered into the host, source, object, time, and message. Windows Event Log entries are decoded into ErrorSource, EventMessage, Host, and EventID.
Out-of-the box events, thresholds, actions (ETAs)	Generally not included, you are left to configure everything yourself	Over 500 pre-defined events (Events, Thresholds, Actions or ETAs) out of the box get you up and running with valuable alerts right away
Application or Service monitoring	Most tools vendors inappropriately use the term "service monitoring" to describe monitoring of application services. "Service monitoring" in this context is limited to specified TCP/IP ports such as SMTP port 25 (e-mail).	ViewITpro provides comprehensive application component and user transaction monitoring capabilities. ViewITpro’s portmon achieves the TCP/IP port monitoring, but its servmon and procmon agents monitor actual application services and processes for the application in the host Operating System.
Advanced performance monitoring	Typically limited to SNMP stats of individual devices.	Beyond SNMP stats. Ability to threshold response times, create user transactions, and end-end service-level monitoring.
IT Asset tracking	Typically a separate product.	Included.
Reporting Capabilities	Most tools store data in tab delimited text files, a greatly constrained data storage method. Charts and reports are limited to simple graphs with very limited scalability and number of data points.	ViewITpro stores all data in a ODBC-compliant relational database. Complex reports and 3D JPEG reports are standard, with the ability to produce event correlation, and trend line analysis over any time period. ViewITpro includes numerous built-in management ready reports such as Availability Reports, SLA Reports, System Health Checks, Alarm Reports.
Configuration and change control management	Generally sold as a separate tool.	ViewITpro contains wizard technology that steps you through the process of adding or changing devices with just a few mouse clicks. Auto discovery allows you to see any changes to your network such as the addition or removal of certain devices.
Integrated trouble-ticketing	Generally sold as a separate tool.	ViewITpro includes its own integrated trouble ticketing system and can easily integrate with other ticketing systems.
Remote device control	Generally sold as a separate tool.	ViewITpro provides tools from the alarm viewer that can reach the troubled device via telnet, WinVNC, or terminal services, saving valuable time and eliminates troubleshooting steps.
Web site and web transaction monitoring	Generally sold as a separate tool.	ViewITpro can monitor sophisticated interactive websites and web-based applications via ViewITpro WebTrans module. Web site statistics are provided via ViewITpro WebStats.
Alarm notification rules / event escalation capabilities	Generally simplistic routines that enable emailing to "group lists" but cannot specify time of day, etc.	Provides the ability to dynamically assign and route events and tickets to specific people or teams, based on specified criteria, and at flexible times of the day and night. Also provides the ability to schedule blackouts for planned outages and maintenance windows.
Advanced network protocol analysis	Generally sold as a separate tool.	ViewITpro can ship with a "sniffer" built in which enables you to identify the "top talkers" and visualize the bandwidth allocation for each protocol (application riding on your network.
Cluster monitoring	Generally not possible.	ViewITpro effortlessly monitors Microsoft clustered applications.
Database monitoring	Generally sold as a separate tool.	ViewITpro monitors DB application components, health, connectivity, performance, and response time and has the ability to perform actual database queries.