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CA Releases UniCenter for Linux
Computer Associates looks like it has finally released it's UniCenter Managment Framework for Red Hat Linux. Other distros to follow soon, and you can order a free CD from CA.
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Maybe, but unicenter is ported to Linux while the other to aren't. What good is better software if it doesn't run on your platform of choice.
As a matter of fact, I'm using ITO 5.0 (NNM 6.0) and I was speaking specifically about ITO's application monitoring
capabilities (or lack of).
Do you have all the latest patches?
We are using ITO on a correctly sized HP/UX server, thank you.
Good!
Now, I'd like to know people using IP unnumbered interfaces on their routers (which Cisco says is the proper way of
configuring WAN links) and still don't poll the routing table.
Try editing netmon.lrf and adding -R to the 3rd field, ovdelobj netmon.lrf, ovaddobj netmon.lrf, ovstop netmon, ovstart netmon. That will tell netmon not to regularly poll routing tables on routers.
Using unnumbered interfaces for WAN links may be the way cisco recommends configuring their routers, but it is not, IMNSHO, the best method. If someone told you to jump off a bridge would you? Using numbered interfaces gives you the ability to ping the other side whereas you don't have that ability using unnumbered interfaces. You can check each level of the stack to see where the problem lies, instead of just having everything "Up" or "Down." I don't recommend using unnumbered interfaces to anyone. (Just like I recommend against using zero subnet networks, even though all router vendors I know of support it).
Why would you want to poll the routing table with unnumbered interfaces? To see if they are up or down? If that's the case, the default for NNM is to SNMP poll unnumbered interfaces. In ITO that default may be different, but I doubt it. If it is, then you can add a -k nonIPStatusPolls=true to the netmon.lrf file. This will give you status info on your unnumbered interfaces. If you don't see connections between your unnumbered interfaces, you could add -k discoverLevel2Nets=true to netmon.lrf. Again, this is the default, so someone must have been mucking around, or ITO a lot different than the base NNM, if you have to do this to get acceptable results.
I again encourage you to join the OVForum. You don't need to be a member (which requires a membership fee) in order to join their mailing list....
HTH
Hey Hey
What's all this CA bashing around here ? Everybody's complaining 'bout how crappy all CA software is. Of course critics have a point when they say Unicenter needs a lot of fine-tuning. But there's only one big point to be made. CA sells Unicenter as an "out-of-the-box" solution, which it isn't. The power of Unicenter lies in all you can do with it, but it takes a lot of time, a lot of configuration and a whole lot of fine-tuning before you can fully benefit from Unicenter.
Unicenter can be a very powerful tool if you use it right and take the time and effort needed to build those things you'll want and need to fully administer your network.
It seems to me that most of the CA-bashers here haven't taken that time and effort and therefore do not realize the full power of these tools.
Wouldn't it be just great to really be able to concentrate on real network management instead of just running around from fire to fire after users complaints. Well, with a proper implementation of Unicenter and the right choice of Unicenter options this can be achieved, but you'll have to change your "way of thinking". That is, react before problems arise instead of after end-users nag you 'cause they can't do this or that.
And no, I'm not working at CA
I don't know about CA. My personal experience with the ubiquitous HPOV has not been very entertaining either.
My company (an ISP) invested time and a lot of money to jump into the network management bandwagon. They choose HPOV (because it's the "defacto standard", they say).
I must say I'm not impressed. The core routers were rapidly flooded by SNMP requests asking for their routing table (each time the 60,000 routes from the internet). We haven't yet found anything HPOV does that we cannot do with free software like BigBrother or MRTG. And we still have to code our own perl scripts that monitors the various applications running on our network. I don't find the UI very user-friendly. The maps are ugly. The various daemons are memory and processor-intensive.
I'd like to find info about other users of network management software in an ISP environment. What did you expect? What did you get? How do you actually use the platform?
Urm... No offense, but how does CA news get a Red Hat logo? I know it's a version supposedly for Red Hat Linux, but isn't this CA news and not Red Hat news?
Just wondering... (No disrespect to Red Hat intended; just trying to point the credit where it's due. CA did this port, not Red Hat.)
We turned off auto-discovery and mostly
use it as a fault-indicator system. And it
doesn't do that very well. It can't seem
to understand that some traps are good and
some traps are bad and keep track of the
status of the node based on the traps. Heck,
even SNMPc can do that. And the get/set
interface is pretty ugly, sow we end up
going to the devces themselves or attaching
proxy boxes with web interfaces.
Now an SNMPc Linux port, that would be sweet.
-- cary
I haven't looked far enough, but if the support isn't free, I wouldn't consider the software free...Would you?
The support needn't be free for the software to be 'free'.. Whether unsupported free software is useful or not is up to the community to decide, depending on that software's utility (security, functionality, robustness, open-standards compliance, etc.) and licensing..
Also, support comes from many quarters, and some of it is free, and some of it is rightfully for-cost... (and, like MS API documentation, some of it is wrongfully hidden or for-cost)
Well, there's options to netmon to turn off pulling the routing table each status poll. This is pretty well know for competent HP OpenView users.
As far as applications monitoring, that's not what NNM is for. Take a look at ITO if you want to do systems management. HP OpenView Network Node Manager is for network monitoring, not applications monitoring. FYI, ITO includes NNM as it's "base" platform.
You're not using the Windows NT version are you? That would be your first mistake. The daemons are not much of a problem if you have a properly sized Unix box. Did you follow the suggestions in the sizing white paper about how much RAM/swap/disk you should have depending on the number of nodes/ovw sessions/etc? Are you using an external database or the bundled one? For large installations you probably want to use Oracle as the database.
Sounds like you are just a little inexperienced and are complaining because you can't figure it out. As a first-step help. I'd strongly recommend joining the HP OpenView Forum and definately their mailing list. The problems you describe are "newbie" problems that get covered quite often on the list (such as polling the router tables in ISP routers). I think you'll get up to speed rather quickly if you participate in the discussions on the mailing list.
HTH
We need to pull the Linux bandwagon fast before all these enterprise companies and their jacked up software overload it. One day we will learn that all this software was a joke gone seriously wrong!
I have a slashdot account, but I'll be anonymous for now...
I too worked for CA for a while, and found it to be quite an interesting place. A saying that seemed to be floating around the company was "CA is a marketing and sales company that happens to sell software." Which seems to be true. They've gotten lots of publicity for Unicenter, but having worked on it I can say that it is a fairly mediocre product, and inherently insecure because it's SNMP based. I'm surprised the guys at L0pht or some other group hasn't demonstrated that yet...
Charles Wang *really* tried to promote a rah-rah we're-all-in-this-together mentality, and the things he said really made him sound different from the typical CEO. But one particular incident revealed him to be yet another cold CEO bastard, worse, actually, for manipulating the employees by pretending to be something he wasn't. Early last summer Wang got a huge bonus, about $550 million, for keeping the stock price above a certain level for a certain time (apparently common practice, I guess). When he got the bonus, the stock went way down and lots of CA employees took a hit (there was some selloff by the corporate executives just before it dropped). If he had really meant all the rah-rah about CA being a big family, he could have taken one percent of his huge bonus (itself only a percentage of his generous compensation) and given each of the 11,000 CA employees $500 as a thank-you token. It would have been pocket change to him, and a big boost to the employees, but he didn't do it. That made leaving CA all the more easy for me.
In general I found them to be quite cold and unsupportive to their engineering employees. It was always pretty clear that we were at the bottom of the heap, below sales and marketing.
CA Unicenter made my life alot better. The company in which I work for use their application Single Sign On. Instead of having to login to each idvidual application by hand and change the pwds, it keeps everything sync'd and logs you in automatically.
I ate my tag line.
I ate my tag line.
-=Ellis (D)25=-
Well, yes, I'm a newbie. I've been fighting with problems and bugs in HPOV (bugs that have been acknowledged by HP support) since about 6 months.
As a matter of fact, I'm using ITO 5.0 (NNM 6.0) and I was speaking specifically about ITO's application monitoring capabilities (or lack of).
We are using ITO on a correctly sized HP/UX server, thank you.
Now, I'd like to know people using IP unnumbered interfaces on their routers (which Cisco says is the proper way of configuring WAN links) and still don't poll the routing table.
I'm really apalled by the fact that we have taken the time (and HP own consultants time) and money to configure a monstruous monitoring server, and yet it is not capable of doing what BigBrother and MRTG are doing on a small PC box.
Now that is surprising. You seem to tell that this is not common policy in other software companies.
Please enlighten me, do you know of a software company where engineering employees aren't at the bottom of the heap?
Yet another large company jumps on the Linux bandwagon. But hey, I'm not complaining. It seems you have to register for support for the free software - I haven't looked far enough, but if the support isn't free, I wouldn't consider the software free...Would you?
Jezzie Ballie
ls:
(A)bort, (R)etry, (I)gnore?
Too funny...Seems anyone and everyone that has ever worked with unicenter holds pretty much the same opinion - it's a pathetic, pathetic tool. I think my grandmother's knitting circle (who are for the most part, quite senile) have more accumulated unix knowledge than the developers of unicenter. And calling the support staff slow rheesus monkeys is really quite generous...
First i'm not suprise it the CAworld show this week. : ... it works on a broad variety of platforms : but the most suported ones are : WinNT, Aix, HpUx and Solaris, but you'll find versions of some parts of the products for synix, SCO etc ...) ....
Unicenter is a package of software to monitor machines from a single "console". They have basicaly two component
1) AT technologie with which you'll try to monitor your machines - It can look on your file systems processes Memory usage, log files etc
2)EM : with which you can act on message that are send from the ganet to the console. manage some tapes and use the workload (a scheduler). tahta part is very tricky and goes low level on the system on which it runs. it is not has widely suported has the AT stuff.
CA products are young and unmature - so installing and configuring them IS tricky (look at the number of patches available here. Unicenter comes with many options some which are great asome which sucks
none Yet.
I used to work @ CA. Please let me just get a few things off my back:
1. CA=Computer Associates=Constant Acquisition.
This company has never produced anything intelligent or even remotely good. They just buy smaller companies, fire everyone and milk their reputations and installed base for all they are worth.
2. Bill Gates is *not* the All-Powerful Evil Overlord of Darkness(tm). Charles Wang is the All-Powerful Evil Overlord of Darkness(tm). After buying a company, Mr Wang gather everyone around him, smiles and announces to the poor jerks: "I don't need you. CA does not need you. You are worthless little pieces of dirt and I am going to make you pay for it".
3. Boycott CA. I am serious: this company, even more than MS, represents everything that is wrong, corrupt, greedy and disgusting in the big soul-less corporations of closed-source software.
Their software sucks anyway.
I worked for CA for 1 and a helf year -- the day I quit that company was the day I started breathing again.
Enough said -- sorry for the ranting.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
speaking as someone with a lot of UNICENTER experience, STAY AWAY, UNICENTER is the largest comglomeration of USELESS CRAP. 2/3's of it does not work as advertised, the support center is populated by slow rheesus monkies, and the documentation is just plain wrong in MANY places.
We've spent nearly 2 years fighting UNICENTER and the IDIOTS at CA before trashing the project and destroying the software. TIVOLI is the way to go...expect to see LINUX support there VERY SOON, and TIVOLI support seems to actually know the product the support, what a concept.
Not to disrespect CA..... I am positive that this product is a wonderful tool and will ease the jobs of millions of administrators, but
WTF does it doo? I wish their technical people wrote that white paper. From the *Why is a framework needed* section: "Pervasively implemented frameworks promised to enable a consistent, dependable, integrated environment, with minimum overhead and maximum flexibility."
English is my first language, but I have trouble parsing that one.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Could this 'story' have been any less informative about what UniCenter Management is? I had to go to their (slow, crashed netscape) web site and hunt about just to find out what the hell it was. Come on Hemos, put a bit of a description of it in the story (thus making me look a dolt in retrospect as people wonder why I'm moaning :) ...
I went to the UT-210 Unicenter Basics course and was VERY unimpressed with the product. The developers couldn't see the forest for the trees. I think they tried to make it too complex a system while they disregarded basic reliability, the cornerstone of any good network management/monitoring suite.
After 15 minutes of poking around, Unicenter crashed. I had to switch machines because the instructor said a total reinstall of NT and Unicenter was needed. I'm good but not that good, I mean 15 minutes and I didn't change a single setting!!!
The software constantly showed incorrect network settings. Machines were up/down when they weren't. I had my dead machine off for 3 hours before Unicenter noticed.
My company is a CA VAR, and even with our great pricing I can't recommend Unicenter.
At CA-World in New Orleans this week, Palm Computing and CA will announce an extension to Unicenter which will support Palm devices.
This is a good move. I forsee easier management and reference with the Palm as a tool. Using the Symbol Technologies Palm Pilots with bar-code readers could be great. What a great way to manager a network!
At CA-World in New Orleans this week, Palm Computing and CA will announce an extension to Unicenter which will support Palm devices.
This is a good move. I forsee easier management and reference with the Palm as a tool. Using the Symbol Technologies Palm Pilots with bar-code readers could be great. What a great way to manager a network!
For a little more info, go here.
There seem to be a few people making comments on CA's software products and their reliability. Well, I'll add my voice to that list. My organization is implementing CA's Unicenter Advanced helpdesk application throughout. 2/3rds of the features of this application are primarily useless, and have no function in the real world. A good portion of the features were completely foreighn to the CA employees that installed the software for us. We have yet to be able to CHANGE OUR PASSWORDS! This is after 6 months of up-time. Give yourself 120 man-hours, and most of the people reading this could come up with a more functional database application on their own. My own, small, meandering experience added to the melee of complaint, and CA is no better off.
Regards,
Gothland
Thats an idea which could sell really well- I'm serious. PHB's who don't understand how the system works can still comprehend pretty graphics.
They also sign the checks.
Look at how much mileage MS has gotten out of the windows interface...