I have worked with various customers over the last 7 years that had NetView
/ OpenView or both. Here are my own personal observations.
1. The Windows version of OpenView use to beat the Windows version of
NetView pants down, but that is no longer true with V6 and higher of
NetView. Today, NetView for Windows is a great Windows application that
does network management. Performance, function and features are very good.
2. In every case where I autodiscovered a network with NetView that had
previously been discovered with OpenView, I found a lot of discovery
discrepancies. In many cases the customer's team that had been running
OpenView thought that NetView was broken. My response was to ask them to
pick 5 routers with discrepancies and walk the MIB of those routers. Then
compare the data in NetView and Openview against the data in the MIB. 5
out 5 times the customer would agree with NetView's discovery....they had
not realized what they had been missing. I have won some networking
people over with this method.
3. NetView's GUI is so much easier to use than OpenView's. Always has
been, always will. This was our original value add to the product back at
NetView V1.
4. MLM's are free (best use of them is to use them as trap filters).
They can be a trap destination for all your devices and be configured to
only forward certain traps to your NMS. This can be done with a box as
small as a PC, depending on your trap storms. This allows your NMS to
function a lot smoother...and protect it against trap storms.
5. NetView is backed by a great support team. I was in a customer shop
that had several OpenView servers. At that time the customer was
considering using NetView to replace them, but needed to see NetView manage
the large networks. We had one up and running managing about 30K of
interfaces, the same as the OpenView server. They picked up some new
devices to manage and the data that came in ending up breaking both NetView
and OpenView databases at the same time. Emergency calls went to both
support teams. With support I was able to get NetView limping that day,
but OpenView was still broken. Within the week a very bright support
engineer developed an efix which brought NetView back to full speed. HP
flew OpenView support people on site, but had not fixed the problem to a
point where Openview was operational. Our test machine became the
customer's production machine.... This conversion happened due to great
support from the NetView support team.
6. The power of NetView SmartSets. Use them via the GUI, in SmartSets, in
DataCollection, in APM. Function is great
Kind regards,
Stephen Hochstetler shochste@us.ibm.com
International Technical Support Organization - Austin
Office - 512-436-8564 FAX - 512-436-8701
ITSO redbooks at http://www.redbooks.ibm.com
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