Goliath Performance Monitor is an IT infrastructure monitoring platform from Goliath Technologies in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania.
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Nagios Core
Score 8.0 out of 10
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Nagios provides monitoring of all mission-critical infrastructure components. Multiple APIs and community-build add-ons enable integration and monitoring with in-house and third-party applications for optimized scaling.
GPM is well suited to environments where there is a high volume of Citrix traffic coupled with a lot of different hardware infrastructure endpoints. Large scale multi-user operations where performance issue detection and resolution are key are the primary areas where GPM excels. Use of the GPM product is less appropriate when trying to monitor response times in a JVM application environment.
Nagios monitoring is well suited for any mission critical application that requires per/second (or minute) monitoring. This would probably include even a shuttle launch. As Nagios was built around Linux, most (85%) plugins are Linux based, therefore its more suitable for a Linux environment.
As Nagios (and dependent components) requires complex configurations & compilations, an experienced Linux engineer would be needed to install all relevant components.
Any company that has hundreds (or thousands) of servers & services to monitor would require a stable monitoring solution like Nagios. I have seen Nagios used in extremely mediocre ways, but the core power lies when its fully configured with all remaining open-source components (i.e. MySQL, Grafana, NRDP etc). Nagios in the hands of an experienced Linux engineer can transform the organizations monitoring by taking preventative measures before a disaster strikes.
GPM does exceptionally well at gathering and presenting deep metrics from our Citrix servers and storing them in the GPM database server. This is a vital strength for any system monitoring tool and allows administrators to address almost any system related performance question.
The MonitorIT front end console does a great job of providing graphical views the summarize data from a multitude of locations. This is particularly important in that it allows administrators to focus in on the reasons for performance issues in a proactive manner before hearing from the end users, especially given the large volumes of detailed data captured by the system
The MonitorIT product is also very adept at gathering metrics across the processing continuum, providing metrics for system resources, service availability and end-to-end user activity. This is a great strength of the system and allows us to develop Tableau visualizations in addition to the extensive reports and dashboarding capabilities of the GPM product.
From a purely personal level I would like to see MonitorIT be able to consume data from our clinical/operational databases instead of relying only on taking data in via the agent, log files and scripted sysoutput.
I think some improvements are possible in the area of custom monitoring of file systems, especially for the detection of missing file scenarios and file volume/rates. GPM only monitors traditional file system metrics like I/O, availability and space utilization, but custom scripting is possible within the design of the system.
Improvements in documenting the data model of the GPM database schema would also be very useful to advanced users of the system especially when additional external reporting tools are used to extend the GPM usefulness
Nagios could use core improvements in HA, though, Nagios itself recommends monitoring itself with just another Nagios installation, which has worked fine for us. Given its stability, and this work-around, a minor need.
Nagios could also use improvements, feature wise, to the web gui. There is a lot in Nagios XI which I felt were almost excluded intentionally from the core project. Given the core functionality, a minor need. We have moved admin facing alerts to appear as though they originate from a different service to make interacting with alerts more practical.
We're currently looking to combine a bunch of our network montioring solutions into a single platform. Running multiple unique solutions for monitoring, data collection, compliance reporting etc has become a lot to manage.
The Nagios UI is in need of a complete overhaul. Nice graphics and trendy fonts are easy on the eyes, but the menu system is dated, the lack of built in graphing support is confusing, and the learning curve for a new user is too steep.
I haven't had to use support very often, but when I have, it has been effective in helping to accomplish our goals. Since Nagios has been very popular for a long time, there is also a very large user base from which to learn from and help you get your questions answered.
We eventually settled on GPM because of its very obvious strength and depth with Citrix monitoring. Our entire clinical system is deployed over a Citrix infrastructure so it was essential to choose a system whose key focus was Citrix monitoring. GPM's functionality is unrivaled when it comes to Citrix monitoring which is immediately apparent when one witnesses the deep internals of the Citrix platform being collected and reported on, in close to real-time.
Because we get all we required in Nagios [Core] and for npm, we have to do lots of configuration as it is not as easy as Comair to Nagios [Core]. On npm UI, there is lots of data, so we are not able to track exact data for analysis, which is why we use Nagios [Core].
GPM has had a decent positive ROI particularly in terms of identifying systemic issues and prevention of system downtimes or resource depletion etc. The GPM product shines a spotlight on configuration and design flaws and as a result makes the systems more stable and responsive, saving us time and effort in diagnosing and reporting on system problems. unfortunately these are quite intangible but nevertheless invaluable business objectives for us, but we can say that downtimes and slowness events have dropped consistently year on year since we deployed GPM.
Our overall objectives with the GPM project was to deploy a system that could be deployed centrally in our Corp datacenter while monitoring devices and users out in the facilities across the East, Central and West geographic regions. The cost of the endpoint agents was quite modest and provided great functionality at this price point. In this respect our business objectives are well satisfied and the system has been a complete success.
An important aspect of our business objective was to have a monitoring system that didn't require constant maintenance and babysitting, and as such the GPM system has worked out fantastically in that we only use 1-2 staff resources to monitor all the systems mentioned earlier in this review.
With it being a free tool, there is no cost associated with it, so it's very valuable to an organization to get something that is so great and widely used for free.
You can set up as many alerts as you want without incurring any fees.
