Monitoring Studio vs. Development of a Custom solution

As it has already been shown by many studies, the development cost of any software solution is an exponential function of the difficulty involved, multiplied by the number of features required and augmented by the time needed for the packaging and development. This does not even take into account the time involved in getting a developer skilled enough in the specific domain of PATROL, PSL and general monitoring understandings.

What this somewhat intimidating equation shows is, that there are many factors that can dramatically increase the cost of a custom development, and some of these factors are rather hard to predict. The most costly factor in this equation though is the number of features and their difficulty to implement. The typical scenario implies that an organization having chosen to develop a custom KM to monitor a custom application already considered the monitoring through features provided by BPM for Servers. Having decided to go for custom development means that the features in BPM for Servers were not advanced enough to serve the multiple and/or complex monitoring needs of the organization.

In order to illustrate the development costs of some examples of commonly used monitoring features, the table below shows how long it took to highly trained, experienced PATROL developers at Sentry Software to integrate these features in Monitoring Studio. The numbers below must certainly be multiplied by a factor of 1.5, two or even more if the development is made by a person less experienced than the developers at Sentry Software.

Feature	T.T.R. (Time To Release)
Simple log files parsing	10 days
Huge log files parsing	25 days
JMX polling of Java applications	45 days
SQL queries (per DB type)	10 days
Graphical interface wizard	4 days
HTTP requests	20 days
Timeout on a command	5 days
Folders monitoring	15 days
Auto-clear of alerts	15 days

Experience shows that a typical custom KM development project involves an incompressible period of 25 days followed by a recurring period of tests, validations and qualification depending on the quality of the development made. This number of typical 25 days also means that custom KMs often drop most interesting features because they cost too much to implement and never fit in the budget. Typically, no custom KM will ever be able to correctly deal with JMX-instrumented Java applications because it is difficult to implement, involves different technologies and great deal of testing on different platforms.

The next table summarizes the typical steps to produce a valid monitoring solution for a custom application and compares how long it takes from the specifications stage to deployment into production.

Step	Development of a custom KM	Monitoring Studio	BMC Performance Manager for Servers
Solution specifications	5 days	5 days	5 days
Development	25 days	1 day (configuration)	1 day (configuration)
Packaging	2 days	–	–
Testing	5 days	1 day	1 day
Debugging	5 days	–	–
Packaging	1 day	–	–
Deployment	3 days	0.5 day	1 day
TOTAL	46 days	7.5 days	8 days

The comparison gets even worse if the specifications are not taken into account and costs of support, maintenance and new features are added to the total.

As explained before, developing a custom monitoring solution allows for the greatest flexibility but this flexibility has a great cost, not just from a pure price point of view, but from a planning point of view. While a BMC PATROL administrator team can respond in less than 3 days to product a valid monitoring solution once it has received the specifications when they use Monitoring Studio, it would take them more than 40 days to do it from scratch!