Scalability
A scalable network management tool seeks to minimize network traffic so the least amount of bandwidth is used. Also, to be truly scalable, the bandwidth consumed should not grow proportionately as a distributed network grows.
TIBCO Hawk agents monitor conditions on their local machines and send alerts over the network only when problems are detected, an approach that has major scalability advantages over a central, dedicated console server. With centralized server-based architectures, monitoring data is collected from remote nodes via network polling or point to point messages to the console generated by simple agents on the devices. After gathering or receiving this information, the console server then makes centralized monitoring decisions. The network bandwidth consumed by polling-based systems grows proportionately with the number of monitored nodes, as does resource utilization on the console machine. Eventually, additional console servers must be employed to scale the system. Using the distributed event-driven monitoring architecture employed by the TIBCO Hawk system, network bandwidth and system resources are conserved by decentralizing and distributing the monitoring load. Another advantage of this method is that alerts are generated only when a problem exists, so under normal conditions minimal network bandwidth is used.