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.
Veeam One works great for monitoring virtual infrastructure. However, other dedicated server monitoring apps do better with monitoring the individual VMs. Where it stands out is its reporting functionality, which allows you to forecast growth and keep track of how you are using your resources. It is also great for companies without a big monitoring budget, as there is a pretty functional free version.
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.
Proactive Alerting - the product can provide email alerts to notify one of any issues in the environment.
Capacity Planning and Forecasting - it has the ability to provide an analysis of the current environment as well as provide a report to forecast future capacity requirements.
Monitoring and Reporting - the software can monitor you environment 24x7 with the ability to provide comprehensive reporting.
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
The licensing is tricky to understand. You can have an enterprise BR license or a Veeam ONE license, and the split modules read from only one module where the license is actually loaded into it.
Documentation could be a little better.
It's not exactly pretty to look at. Themes and tweaks are pretty limited.
We rarely if ever call support, but overall Veeam is very responsive, quick to get a hold of, and knowledgeable in there help. Some companies get big like Veeam and their support drops off, but we haven't seen that with Veeam (but again, their products seem really solid and trouble free so we rarely need help).
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.
Veeam ONE does not stack up well against Prometheus because Prometheus is must more flexibile and customizable. AppDynamics and Veeam ONE are similar in that they excel with certain but different aspects. Veeam ONE with backups and AppDynamics with application performance.
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.
The most positive impact has been a centralized platform to manage all our vCenter Tags, which orchestrate all our BCDR solutions with Veeam.
Response time for analyzing system performance when there are issues has greatly increased due to the simplicity of the software, plus we have been able to allow access to application developers and managers to view and asses their servers when they feel there are issues, without the need to contact the infrastructure team members.
