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CA Unicenter Network and Systems Management (Discontinued) vs. OpenNMS Meridian

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    CA Unicenter NSM (Discontinued)

    Score3.1 out of 10
    N/AUnicenter Network and Systems Management (Unicenter NSM) from CA Technologies reached end of life (EOL) in 2015.N/A

    OpenNMS Meridian

    Score8.9 out of 10
    N/AOpenNMS Meridian is a scalable open source network management platform with network traffic analysis, network discovery, alerting, and monitoring. It's presented as a solution to monitor enterprise network performance and ensure the availability and performance of critical network services.

    $42,000

    per year

    Pricing
    CA Unicenter NSM (Discontinued)OpenNMS Meridian
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    Essential
    $42,000
    per year Up to 2 Meridian and cores Up to 25 Minions
    Premier
    $56,700
    per year Up to 4 Meridian cores and Up to 100 Minions
    Premier+
    Custom
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    CA Unicenter NSM (Discontinued)OpenNMS Meridian
    Free Trial
    NoNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoYes
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
    Additional Details—Add-Ons: -24/7 Emergency Support: $24,000 / year -Mini OpenNMS Appliance: $750 ea.
    More Pricing Information
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    CA Unicenter NSM (Discontinued)OpenNMS Meridian
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    User Ratings
    CA Unicenter NSM (Discontinued)OpenNMS Meridian
    Likelihood to Recommend
    3.0
    (1 ratings)
    8.4
    (4 ratings)
    Support Rating
    2.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    CA Unicenter NSM (Discontinued)OpenNMS Meridian
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Discontinued Products
    It's a decent system if you're a pure IT shop and want to become ITIL-aligned. It forces everyone into an ITIL mentality - service level agreements, change management, and asset tracking. It's very rote, for better and for worse. It's not appropriate at all as a customer-facing or non-IT facing self-service tool. You will never get your end users to really understand how to use the interface.
    Incentivized
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    The OpenNMS Group
    I would recommend all system administrators use some form of network monitoring if they are not already doing so, and I'd definitely recommend people consider OpenNMS if they're shopping around. Small businesses will benefit from the low-cost of entry (it's free!), whilst getting all the enterprise features. Larger businesses can benefit from paid support plans.
    However, there's no getting around the fact that you will require some advanced networking and sysadmin knowledge to get the most out of OpenNMS, or at least, be prepared for a steep learning curve. If you don't have the resources to devote this time initially, you may struggle.
    Incentivized
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    Pros
    Discontinued Products
    • ITIL ticketing (incidents, problems, etc.).
    • Change orders.
    • Matching up its asset management system with incidents/change orders.
    Incentivized
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    The OpenNMS Group
    • Report on SLA
    • Group network areas
    • Discovery of elements
    Incentivized
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    Cons
    Discontinued Products
    • The user interface (UX) is antiquated and clunky. Compared to ServiceNow, it feels like it's 15 years behind.
    • It's complicated - We do routine internal training just to get people to use it correctly.
    • It doesn't have an automated way of discovering assets. Everything has to be force-fed.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    The OpenNMS Group
    • We've had a few issues with delayed alerting.
    • I haven't quite figured out how to make topologies work yet, but I haven't spent a ton of time on it either.
    • We've also had a bit of trouble importing some MIBs, but that usually boiled down to working with the vendor to make sure we had the right MIBs and dependencies.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Support Rating
    Discontinued Products
    We have to hire 2 full-time 3rd-party consultants to run this application. That tells me it's not a very IT-friendly, vendor-supported application. Compare that with, say, SolarWinds, which is much easier for regular IT staff to customize without sacrificing features and capability. Sure, we have to bring in Loop1 to consult for us when we need to do a major SolarWinds config change or need a really unusual custom query built, but we never need more than 10 hours of consulting per month.
    Incentivized
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    The OpenNMS Group
    No answers on this topic
    Alternatives Considered
    Discontinued Products
    I did not select CA. If it were up to me, I would migrate us to ServiceNow. The user interface on ServiceNow is 100% more modern and 200% more user friendly. With ServiceNow, the front page for end users makes it clear: one button that says "Ask for something" and one button that says "Report a problem". That's what our end users need. The biggest problem we have in our organization is that our end users don't report issues to the Help Desk often enough and rarely ask for things through the Help Desk. A clean, simple self-service option like this would open up a world of new information for our customer service team.
    Incentivized
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    The OpenNMS Group
    OpenNMS's more attractive GUI and its price break were the main reasons our company chose to explore and use this product. However, it never managed to actually replace Nagios which had a much more established hold within the company. Perhaps we were over-monitoring, but our company claimed a $100k loss per hour of downtime.
    Incentivized
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    Return on Investment
    Discontinued Products
    • It helped make us an ITIL shop.
    • It was integral during our large IT consolidation 10 years ago in merging 10 different IT departments into one by converging on one ticketing system for all IT issues.
    • Its lack of user-friendliness has gated us from being able to deploy a true self-service IT help desk.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    The OpenNMS Group
    • Initial adoption required quite a lot of resources and time to get everything right. Totally worth it for us; just be prepared for a gradual process that will get better and better with time.
    • Once setup and running smoothly, it provides us with all the reporting we could hope for, at near zero cost.
    • With OpenNMS, we're able to offer a much more reliable service to our customers, and spend a lot less time dealing with issues.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
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