Checkmk vs. Foglight

In our organization which is a mash up of different hardware, software it was important to use an independent tool that wasn’t linked to one manufacturer incase a piece of hardware was dropped from support for example, we also value open-source software highly in our field. It’s important to in our IT environment to be able to customize and tweak software that we run. We don’t use the cloud monitoring aspect so Cannot comment on that side of the software.

Incentivized

Strengths [Foglight]

• Monitoring, Alerting and Management of on-prem virtualization and physical servers
• Historical trending and baselining are excellent and being able to compare a problem period against the same sets of data for a period when there was no issue is especially helpful as part of troubleshooting.
• Ease of use for end users is appreciated

Weaknesses [of Foglight]

• Creation and management of custom monitors is a developer level activity requiring Groovy skillset
• Less useful for management of an environment where there is a large amount of custom implementations
• Commitment to longevity of cartridges/packs for specific subsystems
• Ability to create custom schedules/alerts/escalations is only available via a 3rd party product (from a former Quest developer) and is not particularly easy to manage/manipulate
• Lack of API accessibility for external integrations to other analytics (splunk, etc.)

Incentivized

• Device Management
• Monitoring Network Quality
• Device Quality of Service
• SNMP
• IOT Monitoring

Incentivized

• Database monitoring
• Database management suite
• Customization (both monitors and dashboards)

Incentivized

• Updates
• mobile interface
• Agent for android devices

Incentivized

• There are not many problems with this product
• Limited ability to use Foglight itself to solve problems it identifies

Incentivized

Very helpful software and I highly recommend to have on hand as a tool for testing, troubleshooting, and monitoring.

Incentivized

Overall Checkmk is a great product that is made and ran by a European company that is open source and highly customizable, great support if needed. On prem support is a must for our organization which Checkmk supports. Our organization has been using Checkmk for over 5 years now Performance of the software runs excellent on its own Linux server, for any company with a good Linux admin, you can have a lot of un tweaking and creating custom checks for every aspect of your environment.

Incentivized

Checkmk free version is far superior to PRTG free version. For the paid versions PRTG was more efficient and easier to use. Checkmk provides unlimited services on their free version while PRTG is limited. We like to use the free version to avoid monthly or annual costs while still utilizing the same SNMP features.

Incentivized

Incentivized

• avoid downtime
• Plan updates based on usage of a VM or network switch to avoid impacting users
• User satisfaction increased due to less visible downtime or issues with our IT infrastructure.

Incentivized

• Foglight has a positive impact on my company by being a complete monitoring platform that specializes in risk assessment, user diagnosis and management, and server monitoring ensuring a secure business infrastructure through predictive analytics, query analysis, anomaly detection, behavior tracking, troubleshooting, automated discovery, and more.

Incentivized