CA provides a single proprietary performance agent, which, among many other system collection possibilities, can proxy SNMP collections. Because in our test we were gathering Host MIB and MIB2 data from servers, routers and switches--and we couldn't afford the proprietary agents for system collections--we installed only the single CA proprietary agent.
Unicenter's Performance Management is really a number of applications. The first, Response Manager, gathers SNMP, RMON, RMON2 and CA Response Management Probe data plus Cisco CPU and buffer utilization statistics. We were able to collect, baseline and threshold such data as utilization, errors and response time. The second app was a performance trending application, run in Excel and aptly named Performance Trend.
The Performance Management application provided the most granular control and flexibility for gathering and reporting on performance data among the products tested. But it was also the biggest pain to set up.
We created separate collection groups, which housed network devices and servers and against which we created different collection definitions. These definitions were more like policies, and they organized the data collection, making it easy to audit what performance data was being collected from where.
However, we found it all too easy to make mistakes. For instance, each data-archive parameter had to be separately defined as a distinct collection. So, daily, weekly, monthly and yearly collections each had separate definitions. This level of control allows for the roll-up of any business cycle, but it's important to understand that these are not different data-collection frequencies, just different data-storage parameters. All performance products do this, and the better products clearly expose what's going on, even offering knobs to configure changes when a data collection is started. Be prepared to spend a significant amount of time making this work.
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