Herman.E.Caballero AT Lowes DOT Com writes:
> Can I get an answer from Netview/Tivoli users:
> 
> "What value does the Netview Product provide your company?"
> 
> They want to do away with it here, "besides a map and a bunch of
> events spitting out, what else does it do for you?"  They say!

Do these people have pointy hair?

If they're smart enough to appreciate analogies, you can ask "Other
than tell you when/if the building is on fire, what is our fire alarm
system doing?"   Or "other than tell us when someone has entered the
building without authorization, what is that security system doing?"
"Other than sending out a stream of water, what is that water fountain
doing?"  

A mention of "To your recollection, has their been a network outage
that has gone undetected and impacted our productivity for an extended
period recently?"  If the answer is "No," then you reply "That's the
value NetView is providing.  Timely alerting of network faults and a
graphical view of the entire infrastructure indicating what if any
problems are occuring."

NetView is a fault management tool.  It gives you a graphical map of
network device status, and alerts you to fault and events in the
network.   If they don't need such functionality they don't need
NetView.  But I suspect that they do need such functionality and just
don't realize it....

Funny thing about network management is that when it's working its
best, no one notices it. 

-- 
Todd H.
http://www.toddh.net/