Abstract
Ensuring infrastructure performance and availability with a keen eye to the delivery of critical business
services is not a new challenge. But internal and external cloud, ecosystem-wide interdependencies,
more savvy and impatient IT consumers, and the vastly accelerated rate of change that many IT
organizations are currently facing, make this challenge as new and relevant as ever.
This ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES® (EMA™) impact brief looks at ManageEngine’s
newest version of OpManager, first introduced in June of 2013, which EMA believes is a compelling
answer to this age-old, but newly urgent set of requirements. Included is an interview with one
OpManager deployment for added dimension and insight.
Event
On June 20, 2013, ManageEngine introduced its next version of
OpManager with unique enhancements targeted at improved scalability,
data center visualization, application performance and CMDB integration,
and an enhanced capability for visualizing events across domains. The
announcements herald ManageEngine’s continued growth and expansion
into larger enterprise environments, while maintaining attractive price
points and ease of deployability and administration that allow it to sustain
its popularity among mid-tier and lower-end enterprise customers.
OpManager is a platform for monitoring networked infrastructures with support for SNMP trap,
network traffic analysis, syslogs, and other sources. It can monitor not only routers and switches, but
also Windows, Unix and AIX servers, virtual servers (VMware and Hyper-V), load balancers, firewalls,
printers, racks and other devices, MS SQL, and also Microsoft Exchange, Active Directory, and core
application services and processes. OpManager can monitor VoIP performance for lifecycle support from
pre-deployment testing through production-level troubleshooting. Moreover, OpManager can help to
automate network change and configuration management with policy enforcement for best practices.
June Enhancements in More Depth
• OpManager Enterprise Plus Edition: The June announcement introduced an Enterprise Plus Edition
of OpManager, for very large enterprises and service providers – with a need to reach out to up
to 50,000 devices and one million interfaces from a single probe. The Enterprise Plus Edition is
currently in beta, but priced at or below the $1 million mark in support of ManageEngine’s claim
to “carrier-grade scalability at commodity prices.” ManageEngine also offers two other editions for
OpManager:
◦ OpManagerEssentialEdition for small/medium enterprises with fewer than 500 devices and 10,000
interfaces. It is widely deployed across what ManageEngine estimates as 10,000 customers.
◦ OpManagerEnterpriseEdition for larger enterprises with up to 5,000 devices and 50,000 interfaces.
It is currently in deployment across more than 200 customer environments. Enterprise Edition
starts at $16,495 for 500 devices.
Enhanced Polling andDiscovery:To do this, ManageEngine had to significantly improve its capabilities
for polling and discovery, with support for up to 500 polls per second and a faster discovery engine
that ManageEngine is continuing to enhance. It is also leveraging a highly scalable user interface
built over JavaScript (Ember js).
• Integration with ManageEngine Applications Manager:The new plug-in integration with ManageEngine
Applications Manager will significantly extend its reach in providing a unified view of the application
and the infrastructure with its native support for more than 50 applications spanning physical,
virtual and cloud infrastructures. Applications Manager in combination with ManageEngine Site
24X7 was a “Value Leader” in EMA Radar™ for Advanced Performance Analytics Radar: Q4 2012
and a “Strong Value” in technical performance management and change impact and capacity
optimization.
• Integration with the ManageEngine CMDB: This complements OpManager’s existing strengths in
automating change management across the network with a plug-in that can enable automatic
updates to assets referenced in the CMDB as well as added support for managing the change process
approvals through change advisory boards or other change-management-related teams. EMA
research in Ecosystem Cloud: Managing and Optimizing Cloud Services Across the Full Cloud Mosaic (Q2
2013) showed that those IT organizations with effective CMDB deployments were dramatically
more likely to be effective in adopting internal and external cloud-delivered business services.
• New 3-D Datacenter Builder:This compelling new feature reflects ManageEngine’s budding support
for facilities and Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM). Currently this capability is
primarily directed at providing good visualization of the data center for monitoring purposes. But
future directions should include growing more robust support for power monitoring, capacity
planning and infrastructure optimization across the data center.
• 360° Root Cause Analysis Graph: This is an event-produced graph that allows for a consolidated
view of changing conditions across domains. Over time, ManageEngine plans to add increased
investments in correlation and analytics.
EMA Perspective
ManageEngine will be challenging many in the industry with its new OpManager capabilities – in
terms of both scalability and function, especially as some of the advances continue to mature. The
commitment to a reasonably priced, cross-domain solution with strong hooks into application
performance, configuration and change management, and data center monitoring should place
ManageEngine in the catbird’s seat when mid-tier and larger enterprises stumble over a morass of
expensive, poorly integrated and complex tools.
As with all solutions, the “journey” is still not complete. For instance,
ManageEngine is still improving its API support so that both the
CMDB and Applications Manager integrations can be more effectively
implemented in the same console at the same time. But EMA has spoken
with a number of ManageEngine customers over the last few years and
has consistently been impressed with the company’s progressive approach
to traditionally costly and often unwieldy management problems.
The new editions of OpManager certainly reflect that broader trend as
ManageEngine continues to evolve its portfolio to satisfy very large as well
as mid-tier and smaller enterprises
