+/- of TSMManager

[reddy]

Hello everyone,
Is there anybody using TSMManager for as reporting tool instead of ISC? I just gone through TSMManager.com and sample graphical reports. This is what I needed and was looking from many days.

Can someone let me know if it is good idea to go for TSMManager instead of ISC or both together?

Thanks for your help.

 

[bigmonkey30]

TSMManager is great. I used ISC awhile ago and from what I remember it was limited. TSMManager has more bells and whistles and will work if you are only a UNIX shop.

 

[ttrinh7975]

Reddy,

TSMManager is a wonderful product to generating report. Going back to 2 years...

 

[chad_small]

Hands down TSMManager is the best admin tool for TSM. Now notice I didn't say reporting because there are other products with more robust reporting and charge back features than TSMManager but TSMManager is a very capable reporting tool. If you can get the company to spring for it I would definitely recommend buying it. It will make your TSM admin tasks sooooo much easier. (As for Tivoli they could learn from TSMManager, sometimes less is more).

 

[yampam]

You can try the TSMManager for free for a month and decide .

 

[reddy]

Thank you all for your valuable feedback. I go for trial version for now.

As Chad_small mentioned 'there are other products with more robust reporting and charge back features than TSMManager', Our management is looking exaclty for this reporting and charge back features...
Chad_small, can you teach me more about this other tool which has chargeback and reporting(especially the tool which can report drive and resource utilization in the graph/chart forms)...

When we ask for more drives, my management is not believing us since they think we have more than what we need

Thankyou all again for your feedback and suggestions...

Chad_small, please reply soon to decide what I can go for...thankyou

 

[djchopps0013]

Just another user of TSMManager and it is the best tool out there right now in my opinion. Its a great management and reporting tool. I still tend to use command line for administrating, but the functionality is there in this product. Even better are the reporting capabilities. This is great for management to see whats happening in our environment. I would recommend this product especially for the price. Price some other and you will see what I mean.

 

[spiffy]

I too would be interested in a more robust reporting tool
EMC was recently in and did a TSM health check. They had an awesome tool that was their in house only tool that drilled down really good on TSM
It showed a 24 hour tape drive usage, and the cycles on the drive, graphs on utilization of each pool, in short it was awesome... but not available for me to keep and use....

I have yet to get permission from the man to go ahead with the trial of TSMManager, but hopefully i can try it, and compare other tools, so if anyone has any good suggestions for tools, it would be greatly appreciated!

 

[chad_small]

There are various tools that provide this feature. The ones I have experience with are Bocada Backup Reporting Tool, Servergraph, and Aptare. Of the three I would say Bocada so far has the best track record and is used more widely. Does it have as many features? No. Aptare and Servergraph both have added monitoring and alerting capabilities, Bocada does not have this feature at least since I last used it at IBM over a year ago. Now Servergraph has pretty poor support and the company is moving to a new tool they bought off of STORServer. It's not as capable as the old Servergraph and only runs on Windows. We recently tried the new Servergraph tool and it did not have the ANR alerting capabilities of the old tool and I don't remember when they planned on having it. Aptare is more like the older Servergraph product but updated with better look and feel. I would recommend you look at Aptare and Bocada and see which one best suits your needs and budget.

 

[reddy]

Thankyou Chad_small, does any of Aptare/Bocada/TSMManager have charge back feature?

Right now we are using ISC for any admin work. we need the tool mainly for generating 'resource utilization' and charge backs for our management.