Checkmk vs. Observium

As we have many different applications running on different servers, we appreciate the possibility of writing our own scripts to monitor the different processes and elements. Using scripts of our choice helps us a lot, as we have many different administrators. Thus, we are able to be prepared for upcoming outages or events.

Incentivized

It is a very good overall monitoring solution for any kind of SNMP network device. Fast and simple to set up. It is an easy, robust, and quick monitoring system. The easy-to-use user interface provides advanced capabilities for the statistical display of data, as well as diagrams. This is a great way to add auto-discovery and geographical representation of the network.

Incentivized

• Flexibility using own scripts.
• Observability
• Management

Incentivized

• You can see the bits per second that are happening on the ports, which is fantastic.
• Between logical interfaces, you can see how much bandwidth is being used per second/minute/hour.
• You can infer power consumption and conflicting routes. Great tool to aggregate and visualize your distributed network.

Incentivized

• Updates
• mobile interface
• Agent for android devices

Incentivized

• The documentation needs help. This product, like many other IT products, likes to skip the "101" stuff, assuming that you just inherently know how to do something, and the documentation is just for reference.
• I have not been able to rely on the alerting engine as our primary way of knowing if devices are up or down. I'm sure that's just as much my fault as the software, but this is one area where commercial products tend to shine in comparison.
• The autodiscovery of VMware virtual machines does not work properly if the ESX-level name of the VM doesn't match the VM's hostname. FileServer234 will be discovered, but "Server234 - File and Print" will not.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

After knowing the architecture it is very easy to manage the system, rolling out agents and creating new monitoring tasks.

Incentivized

never contaced support

Incentivized

It's open source. Your mileage may vary. Sometimes the provided documentation is beyond frustrating, other times it's right on the mark.

Incentivized

We moved over to Checkmk from Nagios which felt like a natural evolution at the time as the raw version is based on Nagios, I vaguely not having any major issues moving over at the time. We still use the Raw version but we are planning to move to the enterprise version in the next 6 – 12 months as our needs expand.

Incentivized

Observium is easier to use and "prettier" than most of the other open source tools out there. It's also significantly cheaper than most of the mid-range NMS products out there, and several orders of magnitude cheaper than the big boys. It tends to be my go-to NMS for these reasons, even when budget isn't a huge concern.

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

• Allows us to react immediately when issues occur
• Paying for enterprise support is relatively cheap and we have found benefit from it
• Lots of time spent customising the product has been challenging

Incentivized