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.
Manage Engine OpManager is better suited to serve server and network admins at organization to monitor their servers and network devices. It helps us with compliance with the reports available like utilization reports and capacity planning reports. It helps you to keep track of what all process are consuming the resources. It helps you in monitoring what is happening in your switches, routers and firewall
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.
It measures the CPU utilization of hosts, the network bandwidth utilization of links, and other aspects of the operation
It often sends messages—sometimes called watchdog messages—over the network to each host to verify if it is responsive to requests.
Set Up Notifications And Reports.
OpManager offers a set of advantages that allow it to adapt to the needs of the company, guaranteeing effective monitoring of the application networks used in our organization.
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.
Alerts has to be configured correctly otherwise unnecessary bombarding of alerts can cause inconvenience.
The server on which ManageEngine OpManager is to be deployed should have higher resources as monitoring a large number of devices may slow down the performance of the system.
Configuring the advanced features may require a learning curve.
The rating I provided is based on the product quality, experience (I have been using OpManager for almost the last 4 years), and relevance of the information/response I generated through Manage Engine OpManager. I have also received good support from OpManager.
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.
At first, we were not able to add our Avaya switches to the configuration backup module, our partner tried to help, but they did not find the solution, we had one remote session with tech support of ME and they solve the problem.
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
During our competitive analysis, we found ManageEngine OpManager was not expensive compared to other vendors. At the same time, there was no compromise on the features such as customized reporting or configuring alerts per our clientele's unique requirements. These are our client words "Other vendors ask us to pay more $$$ for enabling additional email alerts".
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.
I don't know if you can calculate ROI with a monitoring solution, there are more factors to calculate.
We found a really big problem with a network switch (faulty transceiver) in a trunk configuration with OPManager. this caused us serial troubles with the overall network stability.
We are loosing around € 3.000 to 5.000 per hour if our network is not working so this was a great help to fix this issue
Our label printers are really important to monitoring in our warehouse system, this makes OPManager a great solution for that
