Intermapper vs. Observium

If you've never mapped your network out before, download a demo of Intermapper and let it run. Your jaw will drop as your network grows before your eyes. If you have your network already mapped, you still would like InterMapper because it will find stuff you did not even know you have. If I were a network consultant, the first thing I would do when I hit a client's site is to start a scan with Intermapper. You will very quickly learn what the topography is.

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

• Provides SNMP and WMI probe data.
• Alerts us in advance of issues.
• Allows us to customize notifications for different groups of individuals in the district.

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

• I don't have many complaints with Intermapper. It's a pretty simple tool for what we use it for, and it has worked well for us.

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

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

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 have been using Intermapper for years and have been satisfied with it to the point that we haven't looked at competitors. The maintenance cost is very low and the product does exactly what we expect and need it to do. The product has gone through a couple owner transitions and still is a effective and when we first procured it.

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

• Allowed us to find issues we had no idea were happening with our network hardware in closets.
• Able to pull network hardware inventory easily.

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