There are several factors, or challenges, that drive a business to add or replace their Network Monitoring Solution (NMS) or Network Performance Monitor (NPM). When a decision is made to inquire into the marketplace and options, having a process in place to help ask the right questions, and even collate the answers into measurable results, can be invaluable in making a rational decision based on price, performance, and reliability without being swayed by glitzy marketing.
What is Driving the Need
Generally speaking every purchasing decision comes down to two business factors, either a new opportunity or a challenge presented by the existing situation. For example, you may have started a new business or grown into a larger organization through M&A requiring you to add a Network Monitoring Solution this would be a new opportunity. Challenges often come to light when existing solutions and processes fail to deliver during a critical event, perhaps an income impacting system outage or an unexpected price increase.
Tool/Vendor Consolidation
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It seems that more and more business are growing through M&A rather than organic expansion. As a result, we often see multiple solutions deployed, non not interconnecting or sharing data, and issues with managing multiple vendors and contract expiration/renewal. The tool's ability to scale beyond a single server or single geographic site into both a horizontal and vertical deployment - affordably - should be a core consideration. How easily can you add another 1k devices for monitoring, what would that cost is hosting and FTE? How long would it take to deploy?
Flexible Escalation and Alerting
Can you manage alerting for different shift hours and days of the week? How about handling for holidays and vacation? What about flexibility in how alerts are created and what content/format that takes? Can you create multiple escalation paths, notifying different people if the alert remains active and unacknowledged? What's the depth of this system, can different escalation paths be created for each type of event, or for different manufacturers or types of devices? The more flexible the escalation and alerting system, the easier it is for you to scale your solution and properly manage your team's workload.
Pricing
Pricing isn't just about the license cost, although that is a consideration. It's about how are license counted, what comes with a license? How man devices can a single collection server reliably manage? Ask yourself what else needs to be bought - do you need licenses for Microsoft Server as well as Microsoft SQL-Server for every new server you deploy? Do you need to pay for user licenses as well? Is Support & Maintenance included in the license cost? What is included with Support?