HP OpenView vs IBM Netview

Hello ? I am a college professor as well as an instructor for a Fortune 100 company and its is amazing you should ask this question! I just finish developing and writing our manual for the SNMP manager. I investigated quite heavily HP and even attended their training for HP?s Openview Network Node Monitor. In addition I had to research other Network management platforms (IBM Netview). The course I wrote is generic-based SNMP management. You have chosen two of the best on the market. To betotally honest with you it will boil down to your network operating system, cost of the product and specific requirements of your network. Do you have a IP-based network or Non-IP based? This will make a difference. Both have similar features as to the way they operate within the SNMP standards. For an example they both operate with the following features: Making a Proactive Network by polling or network discovery, Fault or Problem Management, Network Management, Performance Management, Configuration and Change Management.

Okay so let?s dig a little deeper. First of all IBM owns the company that manufactured the product Tivoli and here is way they say about their product With NetView you have
- rulesets provide some amount of event correlation (only the UNIX version)
- icon acknowledgement is possible
- collections enable to group objects on the map
- good IPX support
- fair amount of SNA management
- in general BETTER with nonIP topology management
With OpenView (I have dealt with unix versions only)
- decent filtering scheme for discovery, topology and maps available
- reasonable backup and restore scripts are provided with the recent versions
- better switch management
- handles level 2 discovery better

describes SMNP management
http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/product/rtrmgmt/cwparent/cw40/cw40ug/perfmgmt.htm

Hope this helps

Greg J. Hauser

And a few additions, from a writer (annex IT architect for Fortune500 company) who did reviews of both in a.o. IDG magazines:
- NetView is better in WAN -aware management. It encapsulates SNMP traps in its 'mid level manager', while Oview relies fully on SNMP for traps over the WAN which is quite risky.
- For event correlation, both rely on another module of their product family:
* NetView on Tivoli TEC (although it can do some basic SNMP-level correlation itself). TEC is really needed to correlate events from multiple sources, including non-SNMP (e.g. WMI from a server)
* HP on OpenView VantagePoint. The integration is more tight than NetView, within IBM's Tivoli division (who now also owns NetView) the TEC and NetView are still separate worlds with a concrete wall (and some API's to share info). This is partly history, and partly because a section of the NView installed base is happy with a standalone product and doesn't like TEC integration.

Hope this helps,

- The Netherlands

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