Intermapper vs. VMware Skyline

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

VMware Skyline is free yet is priceless. Skyline gives you the health of your VMware products in a single pane. Here you not only get issues pointed out to you but the suggested solutions for each issue. Doesn't get better than this.

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

• Easy setup
• Stable
• Data collection

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

• Sometimes the recommendations do not make sense.
• Sometimes the advice is general, but not for us.

Incentivized

It's super easy to use.

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

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

I've used other products such as VMAN and such yet Skyline is different. This is not aimed at your virtual machine's internal usage but at the VMware / Hypervisor level. This looks and monitors at hardware drivers, VMtools versions, and VM hardware versions. If you have Horizon it will look at versions and current vs minimum driver versions.

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

• Weekly reports helps gain long term statistics
• service requests can be easily resolved

Incentivized