The Best of Both Worlds:

HP SiteScope Delivers Agentless,

Full-Featured Monitoring for
Infrastructure and Applications
An ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES (EMA) White Paper
Prepared for Hewlett-Packard
September 2013

IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,

INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING

The Best of Both Worlds: HP SiteScope Delivers Agentless,

Full-Featured Monitoring for Infrastructure and Applications
Table of Contents
Overview........................................................................................................................................... 1
Application or Infrastructure Monitoring? ........................................................................................ 2
Core Features of an Ideal Solution..................................................................................................... 2
HP SiteScope: Centrally Deployed, Feature-Rich.............................................................................. 4
HP SiteScope Key Differentiators...................................................................................................... 5
EMA Perspective................................................................................................................................ 5

2013 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved. | www.enterprisemanagement.com

The Best of Both Worlds: HP SiteScope Delivers Agentless,

Full-Featured Monitoring for Infrastructure and Applications
Overview

Supporting these environments requires skills which we dont have

We are unable to pinpoint sources and causes of problems
Our applications are unstable
Todays companies run on applications, and applications run on infrastructure. However, both are
becoming so prolific and complex that many IT executives fear that they are fighting a losing battle.
Confronted with high expectations from the business and ever-increasing fixed costs, virtually every IT
organization is struggling to deliver high quality services in the face of significant resource constraints.
New demands for business agility are accelerating requirements for innovative IT services. Economic
factors have made business more competitive than ever before and the most successful companies
require the ability to turn on a dime to anticipate and react to constantly changing market and
business drivers. This challenges IT to address changing business needs faster and more efficiently, while
still conducting business as usual. Applications must be still be maintained and delivered at levels of
performance and availability which ensure customer satisfaction.
It appears that this combination of high expectations and constrained resources has become the new
reality governing delivery of IT services. There are few options for mitigating its impact. The businesss
need for agility and dependence on technology arent going away in fact, they will likely continue to
grow. Most IT organizations will be supporting more software applications next year rather than fewer.
And with fixed costs already in the 60%80% range for the average company, hiring additional staff
may be neither feasible nor desirable.
Enterprise management tools provide one of the most effective ways to rein in costs while enabling
IT to respond more quickly to business demands. Engineering and delivering new systems to support
business agility are tasks that must be done by highly skilled personnel. However systems and application
monitoring and troubleshooting are exceedingly time-consuming tasks which can be performed more
efficiently by intelligent management tools.
A growing number of CIOs and IT managers are seeking new ways for their organizations to more
efficiently automate application and infrastructure support. Many see a growing reliance on the right
tools as the best answer to cost-efficient management of modern IT ecosystems. Tools investments can
reduce dependency on new hires to support business growth by freeing up existing specialists to tackle
new projects in a more timely manner.
At the same time, selecting the right tools can be a baffling process. The latest Enterprise Management
Associates (EMA) research finds that CIOs and Director-level managers are charting application
management strategy in almost 60% of companies. This testifies to the importance of these services to
the business; however, while almost 60% of todays companies have ten or more commercial enterprise
management products in-house (and 5% have more than 50!), lack of the right tools is still among
the top three concerns of IT professionals at every level of the organization.
So what are the right tools? This EMA white paper explores this question. It highlights the roadblocks
modern IT operations and application support teams are encountering and presents an incremental
plan for investing in tools which counteract these roadblocks.
It also focuses in on HP SiteScope, a key product within HPs Business Service Management portfolio.
HP SiteScope centralizes production-grade systems and application monitoring, yielding high-value
features with minimal administrative overhead.

2013 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved. | www.enterprisemanagement.com

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The Best of Both Worlds: HP SiteScope Delivers Agentless,

Full-Featured Monitoring for Infrastructure and Applications
Application or Infrastructure Monitoring?

Todays applications are highly integrated and complex, and troubleshooting such environments
requires powerful tools. As one IT manager stated, Today, everything is interconnected.
Almost every IT organization understands that tools are necessary to monitor and optimize performance
of modern technology ecosystems. Most have invested in stand-alone, silo-based tools supporting
operational roles such as systems and software administrators. While such tools are critical, only half of
todays companies have invested in the application-specific (versus siloed) management tools that are
equally important for supporting the delivery of business applications.
Application-focused monitoring is often perceived as being out of reach, budget-wise. The basis for
this perception is the fact that many traditional tools were exactly that expensive, complex, hard to
implement, and costly to maintain. As a result, many companies are simply making do with existing
tools, while IT operations and application support specialists do the best they can to keep up with a
growing proliferation of hardware and software assets.
While infrastructure monitoring is a fundamental requirement for supporting modern applications,
infrastructure and application monitoring are inextricably intertwined. Application monitoring helps
application managers detect problems and quantify their impact on users, customers, and the business.
Infrastructure monitoring provides visibility to the technology components supporting the application.
For companies running modern distributed applications, a combination of the two types of products is
ideal. Combined, they build a foundation for troubleshooting and root cause analysis.

Core Features of an Ideal Solution

While specific feature and functional requirements of such tools vary from company to company based
on the IT environments being supported, a few core functions seem to be on almost every short list:
Ease of use: One key drawback of enterprise management tools in general is their high touch
administration requirements. CIOs often state that their technical teams spend far too much time
managing the management tools. Such products often require deployment of multiple servers
and agents to support data gathering, analytics, reporting, and similar capabilities. Equally timeconsuming is the fact that agents may be platform dependent (and even version specific), making
agent management a confusing and often trial and error process. Over time, servers and agents
must also be patched and upgraded, processes which take time away from the already full project
schedules of IT administrators.
Today, many IT organizations are seeking alternatives requiring less care and feeding. This is
particularly true for application monitoring solutions, which have traditionally been complex and
expensive to maintain. Obviously, products that mitigate high touch requirements are in high
demand.
Support for both Infrastructure and Application Monitoring: When considering the merits of
putting infrastructure- or application-specific tools in place, the right answer is both. Combined
infrastructure monitoring and application monitoring ideally with functionality beyond simple
synthetic transactions provides the depth of visibility necessary for fast troubleshooting and root
cause analysis.

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The Best of Both Worlds: HP SiteScope Delivers Agentless,

Full-Featured Monitoring for Infrastructure and Applications
Centralized dashboard views (see Figure 1): Application support has become a highly cross-functional
activity, with modern DevOps teams collaborating across the entire application lifecycle. Tools
supporting such an approach provide rich dashboard views which bridge diverse teams, enabling
them to work together to solve problems at every stage of the lifecycle. Ideally, dashboards are
Web-enabled, with access controlled via permissions.
Scalability and interoperability: Companies grow over time and heterogeneity has become the norm
in modern IT environments. The ability of a product to scale extends the value proposition as
a company grows, while interoperability enables the tool to support both current technologies
and future innovation. Interoperability also provides a basis for integration with other enterprise
tools supporting functional adjacencies such as Service Level Management (SLM) and Application
Lifecycle Management (ALM).
Virtualization support: Increasingly, support for monitoring dynamic virtual environments must be
part of the mix as well. Almost 50% of todays businesses are using virtualization technology, which
means that VMs are now integral components supporting many business applications. As a result,
visibility to virtual machines in context to their physical hosts has become a key requirement for
both infrastructure and application monitoring products. Such capabilities are particularly useful
for application troubleshooting and root cause analysis.

Figure 1: HP SiteScope Multiview Dashboard

While features are certainly a major consideration, so is product architecture. Although supporting
todays complex applications is non-trivial, the best product for a given company is not always the most
comprehensive, heavyweight solution.
Todays vendors deliver a variety of agent-based and agentless options to meet a wide range of
operational requirements. HP SiteScope, for example, connects directly to managed components to
gather device-specific metrics. It also remotely gathers application-specific information on over 100
popular applications (complete list available at: www.hp.com/go/SiteScope. By delivering broad
and deep functionality in an agentless form factor, both deployment and ongoing maintenance are
significantly streamlined.
3

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The Best of Both Worlds: HP SiteScope Delivers Agentless,

Full-Featured Monitoring for Infrastructure and Applications
HP SiteScope: Centrally Deployed, Feature-Rich

HP SiteScope is distinctive on a number of fronts. One is its architecture. By connecting to managed

systems from a centralized server, SiteScope combines agentless monitoring with a depth of insight that
goes beyond that of typical lightweight options. It centrally monitors distributed IT infrastructure
components such as servers, networks, applications, Operating Systems (OSs), and Internet services.
In terms of managing the management system, it leverages enterprise standards such as LDAP to
control security features such as group-level permissions, user role creation, role-based security, and
authentication of local and remote users.
Another key differentiator is its combined support for
infrastructure and application monitoring. It can monitor the
availability and response of a Web page or set of Web transactions.
It also provides server and application monitoring metrics in
support of performance testing through a native integration with
HP Load Runner and HP Performance Center. With a heritage of
rich integration and support for performance testing, SiteScope
provides an ideal bridge for collaboration between groups with
diverse skill sets and for DevOps initiatives.
Monitors provide additional application-related information by
gathering platform-specific metrics from databases, middleware
and collaboration platforms. In addition to databases including
Oracle, DB2, and SQL Server, monitors are also available for thirdparty packaged software including SAP, Microsoft SharePoint,
Exchange, Siebel, and IBM WebSphere middleware. These
application monitors provide the broad and deep application
insight that is missing in most lightweight monitoring solutions.

No other
comprehensive
monitoring solution
can be set up as
fast or easy as HP
SiteScope.
~ Consultant, Insurance Industry
(Quote from HP case study published at: http://www.
techvalidate.com/product-research/business-availabilitycenter/facts/844-936-F3F).

To speed deployment, HP provides solution templates that apply domain expertise and best practices to
automatically configure monitors, thresholds, and metrics collection specifications. And for companies
running custom applications, SiteScope includes the ability for customers to define custom monitors
and metrics that then flow into alerts, notifications, and reports. Out-of-the-box reporting supports
generation of daily, weekly, and monthly summaries of single and multiple monitor readings.
Two additional differentiators include scalability and interoperability. As a company grows, SiteScope
can scale to 20,000+ monitors per management server and thousands of monitor runs per minute.
Integration with HP Business Service Management suite of products extends the value proposition.
Multiple SiteScope instances can be centrally managed while consolidated cross-SiteScope reports
provide an end-to-end view of the monitored enterprise. SiteScope also integrates with HP Operations
Manager i (OMi), providing a seamless upgrade path to combined agentless and agent-based monitoring
as a company grows.
For additional information, please visit: hp.com/go/SiteScope.

2013 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved. | www.enterprisemanagement.com

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The Best of Both Worlds: HP SiteScope Delivers Agentless,

Full-Featured Monitoring for Infrastructure and Applications
HP SiteScope Key Differentiators
Alternative to heavyweight platforms.

Lightweight installation and administration can be installed in less than one hour.
No agents means reduced time spent managing the management tools.
Alternative to standalone silo monitoring with application monitors, centralized dashboard and
reporting of both applications and infrastructure.
Lower overall Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).
Monitor library: Out-of-the-box support for monitoring of over 100 different types of systems and
applications.
Full featured support for complex applications and technologies such as packaged applications,
databases, and middleware.
Third-party integration capabilities extend the value proposition of existing investments.
Cloud and elastic configuration: Supports virtualized and Cloud environments with deep visibility
to VMware host servers and guest VMs. Monitors configurations in real time, adjusting internal
topologies accordingly.
Support for development of custom monitors.
Solution templates: Customers can jumpstart monitoring for a given application or component
with templates that include built-in domain expertise such as specialized monitors, default metrics/
thresholds, and best practices.
Scalable: Agentless platform that can scale to enterprise-sized IT environments as company grows
or requirements change. Integrates with full-featured HP Application Performance Management
(APM), HP Operations Manager i (OMi), and Business Service Management (BSM).
Available as a Freemium download at: www.hp.com/go/SiteScope.

EMA Perspective

Particularly considering the importance of software applications to the average business, most companies
have under-invested in application monitoring tools. While silo tools abound, 50% of IT organizations
have no application management tools in place. One primary reason for this low adoption rate relates to
the fact that such tools have traditionally been expensive to purchase and install and costly to maintain.
Consolidated monitoring solutions such as HP SiteScope are a new take on lightweight monitoring
that provides far deeper insight than traditional agentless solutions. By centralizing the monitoring
function and connecting directly to monitored systems, HP has combined breadth of coverage and
depth of information in an easy-to-deploy form factor.
The combination of infrastructure and application coverage is particularly noteworthy. SiteScope
puts consolidated infrastructure and application insight within reach of most companies, providing
a welcome alternative for those that lack the resources (or need) to evaluate, deploy, and maintain a
full-blown Application Management platform.
While HP has a long history of producing quality products in the enterprise management space, this
product is particularly well conceived. It combines fast deployment (approximately one hour) with
powerful automated features such as templates, seamless integration to security repositories, built in

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The Best of Both Worlds: HP SiteScope Delivers Agentless,

Full-Featured Monitoring for Infrastructure and Applications
dashboards, and reporting. Its interoperability positions it as both a stand-alone management platform
and a data provider for other solutions within the HP APM and BSM portfolios. In addition, its
strong support for VMware positions SiteScope well for monitoring private Cloud and other highly
virtualized environments.
No product is the best option for everyone and HP SiteScope lacks the autodiscovery, application code
visibility, and self-learning found in full-featured APM solutions. That being said, these features do
exist in other products within the HP Portfolio with which this product interoperates.
Because of its combination of strong features and simple deployment, HP SiteScope is a particularly
good option for companies without application monitoring capabilities or for those using only synthetic
transaction monitoring for application support. It is a distinctive solution that is well worth shortlist consideration for companies transitioning from silo monitoring alone to a more comprehensive
monitoring strategy.

About Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.

Founded in 1996, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) is a leading industry analyst firm that provides deep insight across the full spectrum
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