Cisco Prime LAN Management (discontinued) vs. collectd vs. Intermapper

Although Cisco Prime [LAN Management Solution] is a nice tool and no other 4rd party tools can match its native monitoring and managing capabilities still i have given less rating and that's because it is only for Cisco vendor Devices. Hence if you have only Cisco infrastructure then go for it or else look for another 4rd party tool in conjunction with Cisco prime.

Incentivized

Intermapper is a light weight, quick and easy to use monitoring application. It will get you up and monitoring key infrastructure devices with a simple management interface and effective alert system that doesn't generate a lot of noise. It provides mobile device access through a web interface and is relatively inexpensive.

Incentivized

• Wireless file detection and planning mode has helped us expand into new areas of our buildings.
• Alerting is detailed when we have issues with hardwired and wireless devices, and Rogue Access Points are easily identifiable.
• Cisco equipment information is much more detailed than other management products' SNMP queries and is an excellent tool for troubleshooting end-device connectivity issues.
• Our KPI reporting for senior management and centralized management of our WIPS 'Wireless Intrusion Prevention' setup have both benefited significantly from the detailed reporting capabilities.

Incentivized

• The best thing about Intermapper is that it is map-based. You start by building your map, which is done completely automatically. I've used many different monitoring software packages, Solarwinds, Nagios, Opmanager, and it is a royal PITA to create live maps with those.
• Another great feature is that it shows you, visually, the bandwidth utilization of your network by using "ants" and color codes. Incredibly useful.
• Alarms are very easy to setup, again much easier than the packages mentioned above.

Incentivized

• Maps. One thing that I miss is the fact that you can't see both wired and wireless equipment in the same topology map. For visualization and troubleshooting purposes, that would help a lot, and I honestly don' t think it's that much harder to implement.
• I'd love to see an option to show 'live dashboards,' maps, or other visual tools to publish in a NOC room, or even just to broadcast in a big monitor to allow multiple workmates to check that information. Again, I don't think that would be too hard to implement. I remember a similar feature was available in the first versions of the product, way back in the 90's (yes, I'm that old :-) )
• Sometimes, depending on what screen you are, the solution can be a little slow. I'm not saying the whole system is slow, but sometimes that slowness can bother a little.
• Talking about areas for improvement, one area I think can be improved is the upgrade process. Even for not so large deployments, it can take a lot of time. Having this time decreased would be the right thing to do.

Incentivized

• Setting up probes in bulk can be difficult, so it can take a long time to get the system set up correctly to start.
• Sometimes the probes can be sensitive and report false positives.
• Interface can be a little clunky and non intuitive at times.

Incentivized

We are very happy using Cisco Prime LAN Management Solution for the following reason: 1- Ease of use with the GUI. 2- Very well organized dashboard which can view many statistics on your devices. 3- Customized dashboard for different views ( for technical team and executives ) 4- Schedule configuration templates to use whenever we need on whatever device we want.

Incentivized

The product works well and is very easy to maintain. As such, we haven't had many occasions to use support. When we have called them they were easy to contact and responsive to our questions. We have had the product for years and it may have been a year or better since the last time we contacted them.

Incentivized

There are various 3rd party tools available in the market which not only supports monitoring of cisco devices but also supports non-cisco devices, even with these capabilities in these 3rd party tools Cisco Prime has maintained a uniqueness in its products being the native tool from Cisco. The uniqueness is about product supportability for given devices and some of the edge features such as configuration management, detailed heatmaps etc

Intermapper is a cross between WhatsUp Gold and Nagios. WhatsUp Gold being for a less technical end-user and Nagios doing more than just SNMP scans and up down monitoring.

Incentivized

• It has helped us with our quarterly wireless security testing by pinpointing the location of non-approved access points vs. hunting for them via signal strength.
• Saves time by helping to identify network health issues before they become a definitive problem causing downtime.
• With errors detected early, we have noticed our wi-fi network is much more stable thus freeing up our engineer's time elsewhere.

Incentivized

• Downtime costs money. Every minute we can get ahead of an outage is time that a plant is not sitting there waiting. We don't need to wait for a call from a plant, we know they are down immediately and we can begin troubleshooting.

Incentivized