The idea of creating this IT Infrastructure management and monitoring buyers guide is to provide prospective buyers of any IT Infrastructure Management Solution to create a comparative analysis of the products they are evaluating for monitoring and managing their IT Infrastructure. During evaluation you can categorize the features you are looking for as:

Essential: A necessity , without which the solution will not be useful for you.

Good to have: It can add value but is not a necessity.

Luxury: A feature which will add more comfort.

Not Required: A feature will have no impact and will add no value   either.

I will keep on adding questions which will be helpful in analyzing the solutions. I would also appreciate if you can add more questions in case you feel something is missing from your wish list in terms of an IT Infrastructure Management and monitoring solution. This will help our friends to perform a quick comparative analysis of IT Infrastructure management products.

Discovery of the enterprise

1. Does the solution have the capability to automatically and intelligently discover the network elements in the network and create a logical view of the network in a graphical format?
2. Does the solution have the capability to automatically discover the network elements using standard and vendor specific protocols?
3. Does the solution have the capability to perform continuous discovery of the network elements?
4. Does the solution have the capability to manually discover device(s)?
5. Dos the solution have the capability to provide to manually add a custom device?
6. Does the solution have the ability to provide a graphical view of the relationship between the network elements?
7. Does the solution have the ability to customize the network maps based on the physical and logical connectivity?
8. Does the solution take toll on the network performance when performing discovery?
9. Does the solution provides an on demand or scheduled discovery options?
10. Does the solution have the capability to discover the virtual infrastructure?
11. Does the system provide the capability of grouping a set of network elements, applications and databases for monitoring as a business service?
12. Does the solution have the capability of discovering entire inventory information of the network elements?
13. Does the solution have the capability to create an alert in case a new network element is added to the managed network?

Fault Management

1. Does the system have the capability to collect and display events from all network elements across the enterprise on a single console?
2. Does the system allow you to filter events from all network elements across the enterprise based on the severity?
3. Does the system allow you to filter the events based on keywords (event patterns, date, device, time etc)?
4. Does the system provide you the freedom to decide which events to convert to alarms so that all the events do not necessarily generate alarms?
5. Does the system allow you to perform automated actions (starting a service, running a script, creating a trouble ticket, sending email alerts etc) on an event or an event pattern?
6. Does the system provide impact analysis of one or more network elements failure onto other network elements?
7. Does the system provide user based security to allow or deny operator access to event management console?
8. Does the system have the capability to suppress duplicate alarms?
9. Does the system have the capability to generate a new event in case of any event getting generated from the network element?
10. Does the system have the capability to distribute the event management systems across enterprise (A capability where one event server forwards only filtered events to the centralized server from its domain)?
11. Does the system have the capability to provide an exception list for events which get generated during scheduled downtime?
12. How much do you rate the event management functionality on a scale of 1-10 (1 being the worst and 10 the worst)?
13. Does the system have the capability to suppress duplicate alarms?
14. Does the system have the capability to provide Root Cause Analysis (RCA)?
15. Does the system have the capability to provide Impact Analysis?
16. Does the network system provide a graphical and comprehensive view of your enterprise and its real time status?
17. Does the system have the capability to intelligently correlate the fault and performance degradation conditions before they become serious network problems?
18. Does the system have the capability to calculate revenue losses for a business unit or the entire enterprise based on the downtime of a network element?
19. Does the system have the capability to provide complete analysis where the problem lies (Network, Systems, Databases or the application)?

More to be added…