The term “network management” encompasses a broad range of solutions from single point products to element managers to large enterprise-class solutions. For the purpose of this ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES® (EMA™) report, the term Enterprise Network Management Systems (ENMS) includes network-centric management solutions that are used by large organizations’ operations and engineering teams to discover, monitor, assess, troubleshoot, and generally maintain highly distributed enterprise networks.

For this EMA™ Radar, the focus was put specifically on core capabilities and features primarily associated with network operations’ need to ensure health and availability of the network. Supporting functional capabilities such as performance monitoring, configuration management, asset management, as well as integrated management of connected non-network devices were also considered, but as non-critical (albeit helpful/valuable) extensions.

In this EMA Radar, 16 current ENMS solutions coming from 15 vendor providers are reviewed and compared according to a broad range of measures regarding both product strength and overall cost efficiency, as well as in terms of the overall strength of the vendors themselves.

Value Leader: Infosim 

Infosim is not as well known in the U.S. market as many of the other solution providers here, but the company has been in business for almost ten years and is based out of Würzberg, Germany. Infosim puts strong emphasis on its discovery capabilities and this was confirmed in both our findings and conversations with its customers. One StableNet® customer purchased the product just for the discovery engine. Infosim StableNet® also did well in ease of administration and IT cross-domain dashboard integration.

Scalability was another area of strength, both with our weighted scoring as well among reference customers. Infosim StableNet® was one of the few solutions that can scale to very large managed environments while still running the monitoring component on a single server.

Best Virtual Networking Management: Infosim StableNet® 

While most every solution reviewed in this study has made some adaptations to support integrated management of virtual network components within virtual server environments, Infosim has gone the furthest, with the most detailed support capabilities, the most environments supported, and the broadest set of means for collecting and updating managed entity information as well as the dynamic connectivity they enable.

Source: EMA Radar for Enterprise Network Management Systems - Q4 2012

Read the full report here. 

Thanks to Infosim for the article.