Recommendations for an enterprise management dashboard

Question

Like many organizations, I don't have a single software application that I run to support the enterprise. I have many different software components that facilitate the business and these software components are deployed to multiple machines. All of these applications were built with some enterprise monitoring and management in mind. Since we are a Windows shop, we made sure they publish performance counters and use WMI to expose services.

Where we have struggled is in finding enterprise management software that can at a glance provide us with a high level dashboard on the health of our system. For example, if I have 10 instances of a software component running and said software component is publishing 2 critical performance counters, how difficult would it be to have a drill down for that component that allows me to see a graph of the performance counters for each instance. Additionally, I'd like to have a solution that can "alert" me when performance counters cross various thresholds...

In the past, I've looked at the big boys... OpenView, Unicenter, etc., but I didn't see anything that would provide me with a single real time view of performance counters for my set of instances. Can you help? Have you seen any tools that help pull the enterprise management picture together?

Answer 1

at the risk of being downvoted for blatant self-promotion, this is exactly why I wrote the CALM product - primarily for .NET applications

it can be used with other platforms, it's just a little more work

some of the features you want are planned for the next version; customization for your specific needs is also possible

contact me directly (see my profile) if you have any questions or need customization

Answer 2

For network monitoring you can use What'sUp Gold, it's not really cheap, but mostly worth it.