soap box on:
I have not worked in the lab with ITSA 1.2.1 yet, but I have worked with
ITSA 1.2.
The value is good if you have a single tier of switches. When NetView
sees a server go down, ITSA will report via a trap if it agrees that the
server interface went down, or if it was the port itself. If you loose a
whole blade (which happened to us 6 weeks ago) then switch analyzer will
tell you it was a blade that affect this group of devices.
NetView reported 48 IF Down events. Switch Analyzer will report a single
trap saying it was the blade. Wouldn't it be nice to have the network
engineer know what the problem is before he/she drives to your building to
fix it? With this trap they could have the knowledge to pick up the
replacement blade from their storage area before they drive to your
building. Woudn't this reduce your outage time? You ROI would grow as
fast as your outages that are quickly fixed.
The value is even greater if you have tiered switches which is quite
common. If you loose a port or cable on your switch trunk, how do you
know this was root cause? From NetView or any other IP manager you would
get many IP down traps. RFI would turn the subnets white behind the trunk
as long as the whole subnet was behind the trunk. If the part of the
network that is down is just part of a VLAN where you have subnets spread
out, then RFI will not help you since all the routers must be down in a
network for RFI to recognize the subnet is unavailable. In this case,
every IP address behind that trunk generates IF Down. This could be 50,
100s or more. With Switch Analyzer installed, you get one event reporting
that this trunk port is down. You can be the judge if this root cause
event (layer 2) is worth the cost.
Are you doing availability management reports? Do you know the number of
outages you had last year? Do you know the average length of outage? Do
you know what it costs your company for every minute of outage? As you
have more history saved it will help you to make a business choice and
understand the savings generated from a root cause analysis tool such as
ITSA. Instead of management taking forward they want to spend $xxxxx,
they can go to their bosses and tell them that they have found a way to
save $yyyyy this year...and each year after....with an initial investment.
soap box off:
Kind regards,
Stephen Hochstetler shochste@us.ibm.com
International Technical Support Organization at IBM
11400 Burnet Road Austin, TX 78758
Office - 512-838-6198 (t/l 678) FAX - 512-838-6931
------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.redbooks.ibm.com
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: nv-l-unsubscribe@lists.tivoli.com
For additional commands, e-mail: nv-l-help@lists.tivoli.com
*NOTE*
This is not an Offical Tivoli Support forum. If you need immediate
assistance from Tivoli please call the IBM Tivoli Software Group
help line at 1-800-TIVOLI8(848-6548)
|