Some Capacity Management products require their own ‘third-party’ proprietary agents to function. Mirador CM uses HP’s Operations and Performance agent technology, accessed through the Performance Manager ‘gateway’. The differences between the two approaches are summarised below:

• Installation Time
  The installation of third-party agents will usually mean shipping an install package to the target server, running the install program under a privileged user id., and then checking the communications to a central control server. This can be a very time consuming task, particularly if a large number of servers is involved or where Change Control procedures are required.

• Overhead
  Any additional agents will consume further CPU, memory and storage resources on the production servers.

• Quality and Reliability
  The HP agent technology is world-renowned for its very small resource consumption footprint on the target server. The HP agents are robust, reliable, non-intrusive, and diligently maintained.

• Auto Discovery
  Mirador CM will automatically discover the agents which are ‘known’ to each OVPM instance and will also capture the OVPM group (application) hierarchy. This is not possible with third party agents where each one must be defined individually to the central control server. In the Mirador CM maintenance section the user can specify the frequency of auto-discovery runs (the default is 28 days), the collection profile to be used for newly-discovered servers, and the amount of historical data required. This means that, as new servers are commissioned, they will automatically be configured in Mirador CM and data collection started.

• Historic Data
  Third-party agents will only start to capture data once they are installed. The HP agents that have been installed for some time will have built up a considerable amount of useful historic data stretching back, for some servers, some six months or more. Mirador CM will optionally collect and store that historic data – an essential pre-requisite for meaningful Capacity Management.

• Additional Metrics
  Most third-party agents are capable of collecting a pre-defined set of metrics. Mirador CM can collect, store and report on any of the wide range of metrics (including metrics from SPIs or DSI sources) that can be captured on the target servers.